I don't think it's passive aggressive. It could actually just be a mistake. I've emailed (admittedly much smaller) news organizations before when their RSS feed

I don't think it's passive aggressive. It could actually just be a mistake. I've emailed (admittedly much smaller) news organizations before when their RSS feeds went down, and received a response and a reinstated feed. I wouldn't bet money on it coming back, but if this was an intentional move I might have expected them to replace the page with "Sorry, no more RSS, try our app!" or something. They are also still linking to the feeds at the bottom of many pages, like this one: https://www.reuters.com/tools/mobile/us https://www.reuters.com/tools/mobile/us