If we’re going to go with anecdotes, I can counter with all of my friends (entirely non-technical) simply stopped consuming via RSS because there were no alternatives at that time that ticked all the boxes.
For me, the key is that Google Reader actually killed off competing products during its existence. Then when they killed of Google Reader, that stunted the ecosystem because anyone who wanted to provide an alternative was starting from the ground up. All the time that could have been spent driving RSS forward was instead spent on catchup.
FB and Twitter dropping their feeds may not have happened if the RSS ecosystem evolved to benefit them in some way.
