I love both RSS services and read later services. My current choices are Ominvore to save stuff for later, and Feedbin to handle RSS with Unread on macOS/iOS. These excellent tools let us keep up with many sites without needing to visit them all the time. They let us save stuff in a queue to come back to later. The downside to aggregation tools is that we loose some of the beautify of the web.
Take this Verge article on The Great Fiction of AI. Don't just save it for later, take a look at the design. How many hours were spent on this layout to make the piece stand out a crowd of repetitive articles about writing and AI?
Or head to Matt's site Birchtree.me to enjoy the thoughtful typography and layout that Matt has put into the site.
Real Life Mag also put a lot of effort into their piece on nostalgia.
Heck, despite not being a designer I spent a number of hours choosing the theme for my site and getting it to look as good as I can make it. I'm usually very pragmatic and don't bother with huge design work on my site trusting in my words to do the heavy lifting.
RSS may provide a central spot to keep up with sites, but it doesn't let us appreciate the thoughtful effort that has been put into the sites. RSS and read-it-later services strip all that away to let us focus on the words alone. Yet reading the AI article in Omnivore vs reading it on The Verge brings an entirely different feeling to the content. Reading about writing and AI as it was designed brings more gravitas to the content, something that's missing with stripped down words on a page.
I'm an old guy and remember the amazement at CSS Zen Garden. The idea that you could change CSS and totally change the feeling of a site made it feel like new worlds had opened up in my career. I remember trolling lists of beautiful sites for ideas for my site, to try and find the thing that embodied what I wanted to get across with my site. What would make me appear professional as I started my career?
While I won't be ditching RSS or Omnivore to work through articles, I am going to spend more time viewing content on the original sites so I can enjoy them as the author intended.
That is going to mean that I'll see more ads from crazy ad laden sites, but I can easily leave those when I encounter them and stay on the sites that are beautifully designed and need visual appreciation.