I find articles like this obnoxious because 1) they (implicitly or explicitly) claim that RSS was at some point popular (with "normal users") in some way that

I find articles like this obnoxious because 1) they (implicitly or explicitly) claim that RSS was at some point popular (with "normal users") in some way that it is not today, which is wrong. 2) they completely ignore the fact that RSS today is significantly more widespread than it was a decade ago. Yes, Google Reader is gone. Get over it. Flipboard and similar have heaps and heaps of users, and they're all RSS-based.