Agreed, rss was popular with people who wanted to decrease noise.
> RSS also kills monetization, since you can't have ads
This was the killer and the dumb part, because it could, but monetization sofar means integration with all the bad parts of the Internet that desire to track people.
But until that happens, ads fill a middle ground: users don't want to pay and creators want to be paid.
The recent @patio11 Complex Systems podcast lays out how it works:
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/justin-kuiper...
But RSS made tracking very hard. And while I know that's your point (not wanting to be tracked), one reason it works in YouTube videos is there's a lot of analytics that can be used to advocate for rates (and track what's skipped, what's watched, etc).
Most people who use RSS, use it because they don't want to go to a website (filled with ads) and they want content 100% for free.
Perhaps it is time to revisit a distribution model, where the full content of the article is available for paid users inside the reader itself. The RSS reader would require a subscription and pay RSS feed providers a share of the subscription price. A sort of distributed spotify model.