I have to imagine that for a chrome releases and developer updates blog that this has absolutely nothing to do with ensuring someone uses search or ads and more just plain priorities and no one bothering to add RSS after they upgraded the site. Occam's razor and all that

Or maybe they gaslight that as the reason. Their blog post talks about how they don’t have resources and they are prioritizing.

So I agree the real reason is that google doesnt want people using minimally tracked file downloads and thinks they can shovel people towards their more data rich analytics and content consumption.

I think you're falling prey to Hanlon's Razor. What probably happened here is something approaching the following conversation:

$PM: Hey $ENGINEER, it looks like this "arr ess ess" thingy has very few users, do you know what it does?

$ENGINEER: Yeah, it's a web standard that publishes a feed of updates to our website. It's kind of neat actually, if you have an RSS read--

$PM (waving hands): okay skip the wikipedia article, that's fine; but does it generate revenue?

$ENGINEER (blinking): uh...no, it doesn't. Anyone can query our RSS feed and update their local cache of articles and read them later, it's actually really useful if you're ever somewhere without interne--

$PM: So we can't monetize this?

$ENGINEER: ...no, this is an RSS feed for a tech blog. We can't monetize this.

$PM: If you remove this and integrate $FEATURE on $PAID_SERVICE, I'll write you a better peer review this year. It's reducing tech debt right? This sounds like an old school thing anyway, I've never even heard of it!

$ENGINEER (heavy sigh): Yeah, whatever man.