Now that Reader is closer to death, has a superior alternative emerged?

I like Tiny Tiny RSS. It's open-source and self-hosted, so not reliant on other people. While you could host it on your own computer, I prefer to host it on heroku (https://github.com/projectdelphai/ttrss-on-heroku. It's also been hosted on openshift (http://tt-rss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1360), but I have no experience with that. Overall, though, ttrss works really well. I would highly recommend it.

I think most people are going with feedly or the old reader

many people are using http://www.newsblur.com also