Although RSS feeds are alive and still heavily used today, their level of adoption has suffered because of how difficult a handful of popular technology companies have made it to use them. Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.
RSS feeds are incredible and I absolutely hate how many websites stopped using them or providing them. I’ve built so many web scrapers that probably uses more of their server resources because a site refuses to provide a way for me to know when they have new content.