I do think we need something like RSS, but RSS as it is has several immense problems that hurt its adoption. I'll list the problems I found here.

1. RSS isn't HTML. I know how to write HTML, I don't know how to write RSS. It's probably not hard, but it's one extra thing to learn.

2. You don't know what your website's RSS looks like until you use it. This is like using a screen reader. When you check your website, your articles, posts, etc. you check in the web browser. You edit it to look good in a web browser. You won't catch that something looks wrong in RSS unless you open it in a RSS client. And honestly, there are just way too way too many modes to view a single article! Desktop, mobile, tablet, RSS, screen reader, how it looks when you share it in Facebook, Twitter, how it looks on Google, on AMP. Nobody is going to check every single one of these.

3. The default RSS CMS implementation doesn't align with most publishers' interests. By default, CMS's will just put all of the content of an article as a RSS item. Most websites that make money off writing content need you to go to their website to see ads or buy things to make money. This is why social media thrives where RSS doesn't. Social media users only get the headline, and they may have long, verbose arguments about that headline, but they won't read the rest of the article unless they actually go to the website.

4. It's non-trivial to change this RSS implementation. The only reason why so many Wordpress websites expose a RSS feed despite that going against their interests is because the owner doesn't know what RSS is! If they knew, they would disable it right away! But you might be thinking, why disable it when you can just change it to look like social media? Because it's simply not that simple. Changing the HTML output of CMS's is very easy because that's a common use-case. Lots of documentations, tutorials, etc. Changing RSS or even a sitemap.xml is arcane knowledge. Personally I don't even know what is the point of having RSS feeds per article for the comments. Who uses this?

5. RSS clients have an unique, subpar experience. One thing that is immediately obvious if you check a RSS client is that it's fundamentally different from a social media feed since there are no huge, irrelevant images on every post. Imagine you see an article about something remotely related to Amazon, without a photo of Jeff Bezos under it. How can people consume content like this? You can get feeds from Youtube without Youtubers making stupid faces on the thumbnails! That's bad for click rates! In all seriousness, because of how ignored RSS is, you can end up in a situation where an article's HTML exposes metadata such as the article image, but the RSS feed has no image on it, or the article has widgets that require JS, but the RSS client can't run javascript, or the RSS feed needs CSS to make its text colored or something, but the RSS feed didn't get that, etc.

6. No discovery. Chrome could literally just show me a RSS icon in the address bar to say it's available (like Vivaldi does) but it doesn't, which means nobody knows you have a RSS unless you tell them, and most website owners won't tell their users about their RSS because they don't even know they have RSS to begin with. Most places you can search for RSS feeds are online clients, and if I'm using an online client I may as well just use social media. Why is it so hard for people to just put add some keywords/tags field in their RSS and then make a link aggregator that is like subreddits but it just pulls articles from a thousand different feeds and sorts them according to their tags automatically? That would be a win-win-win for everybody!

Honestly, I think it would make WAY more sense if instead of RSS, which has its own markup, its own URLs, etc., we just had local "feed clients" that you gave a URL to, and it just searched all <article> elements or rel=bookmark or something like that, found their respective URLs, downloaded the HTML of every article, and showed the <title>, <meta> description and image in a feed just like a search engine would, with a favicon too. We could even use the dreaded <meta keywords>. But of course HTML dropped the ball by making the <article> mean things that aren't actual articles and even things that don't have their own URLs, titles, or descriptions, so this would need its own schema/microformat, which nobody would implement because nobody uses this client yet, which is why RSS is the best we got even though it's just not as good as social media for a number of reasons.