I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching. If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of

I think one thing that you're missing that hasn't been mentioned is content caching. If your favorite website went away, you could still read and search all of the articles in the cached feed. I don't think there was an expiry time on it (other long-term users, feel free to correct me). These days there is no equivalent. If someone you follow decides to take down their website, you have to hope that someone archived some of their content on the popular archive sites.