I now use the dumb, low-tech solution of having a few folders of bookmarks of sites in various categories, which I'll occasionally check using "Open in Tabs".
Lamentable
I don’t like Feedly’s own web-app frontend, but you don’t need to use it; there are many nice, fancy RSS-reader clients implemented as native apps on various OSes, that can use Feedly as their backing service, sort of like a native mail client using IMAP.
Personally, I use Reeder on macOS and iOS, but there are at least a dozen such clients that connect to Feedly.
I should also mention, if it’s the backend features that you have a problem with, that there’s at least one piece of RSS server software, https://feedafever.com/, that all these clients also natively support (or at least supported; the product is dead now, so some clients are sadly removing support.) I mention it because it was a host-it-yourself solution, and therefore, even though it was a closed-source product, it had a clearly-defined client-server protocol and clients supporting Fever servers also necessarily have/had a “server API endpoint URL” field in their Fever service configuration. This means that it’s possible to implement a Fever-protocol server yourself, and any client still supporting the Fever “service” will then sync their subscriptions and read-states against your backend. So you can actually have whatever backend features you can think of, if you really care to.
(Tangent: why has nobody written an RFC for a standard RSS client-to-service sync protocol? Fever’s protocol is pretty crap, honestly; it used very nonstandard names, aggregated events into messages at the wrong levels, etc. There’s no reason that all these RSS sync-backend services need their own custom APIs; they all have exactly the same data model. Though, I guess, when you start to think about it, you realize that there’s no reason that these backends shouldn’t be speaking IMAP to their clients...)
Honestly, I think momentum has shifted, mostly to twitter, w/ people either posting content directly there or linking to medium, and occasionally, personal blogs.
But Twitter is flawed (if for no other reason, than because they are increasingly exercising editorial control). I look forward to whatever replaces it...
It's 95% of what Google Reader used to be, your missing 5% may vary.
(For me, my missing 5% is a decent mobile client, but I miss that a lot less than I expected)
I used to flood myself with headlines there and read the ones with interesting titles or high popularity (I don't even remember what that was based on; number of stars by other Reader users?) Then I'd just mark all as read.
Reddit and HN have replaced this for me somewhat, the only issue is that I don't get to curate the source blogs anymore.