This is a super-valuable post!
Back in the hey-day of blogging, RSS feeds were all the rage. They were pretty much killed when Google bought up FeedBurner and destroyed it. There weren't very many alternative services that allow blog owners to monitor their RSS subscriptions. And many people just discovering the internet at the time and subscribing to blogs didn't understand them. They didn't know what an aggregator was and why you needed one. So email subscriptions won out.
RSS feeds are awesome. I'd like to see them come back.
I'm still using them a lot.
I even still use Feedburner, but only to style my feeds. People have been saying for years the site will disappear, yet, it is still there. And true, some of the features don't work anymore, but I haven't found a worthy, free alternative yet to add styling to my RSS feeds.
It's kinda funny: although I use RSS feed URLs for a lot of things - mainly for cross-posting, but also for things like what I talked about in this post, I'm still an old-fashioned email person myself. I only use aggregators to set up autoblogs and things like that. You'd think I would have evolved by now, but I'm still reading emails 😂