It is not uncommon in Europe, I believe. Swedish government had put a lot of effort into making Sweden a cashless country: it’s rare to see businesses accepting cash aside from grocery stores. But even here occasionally you get a yellow pamphlet called ”If crisis or war comes” that advises you to have a small surplus of cash in case <put enemy country name here> hackers manage to take down banking infrastructure.
Why having an easy way to organise a data feed that will work even on cheapest clients and servers, when you can simply boil a tank of water to get a half-assed hallucination loosely based on the source, right?
I have seen people trying to bury RSS for the past 15 years — didn’t happen yet. It is still widely used by blog enthusiasts — that’s basically how I get information about new posts from my favourite old-tech authors.