There were plenty of RSS readers. Many browsers had them built in: Mozilla called them "Live Bookmarks" and even Safari once had an RSS reader. I used apps like Reeder and ReadKit and loved them, but my favorite apps were probably newsboat and newsbeuter (CLI RSS readers; newsbeuter goes back to 2007).

It's like people forgot that non-web-interface rss readers existed.

I still use some RSS reader apps to keep up with various sites I care about.

Also, remember that ever podcast is also an RSS feed.