I use the excellent vore (vore.website) for rss and I just get a chronological list off my RSS feeds. My brain has a feature called "memory" that stops me accidentally reading any articles twice, and even better, I don't have a feeling of obligation to my rss feed reader.
When I pop into my RSS reader, my sole goal is to read something new. I want to read from one publication at a time, and I want to know I've seen everything they post (not every article is worth reading, but if their best content isn't so good that I care about missing it, they aren't worth subscribing to).
Without read/unread this doesn't work. I've got too many feeds to just remember the latest thing I've read in each. And I want my RSS reader to only show publications with new articles, rather than clicking one after another like pulling a slot machine to see if it has new articles. And my memory isn't perfect — I may mistakenly think I've already read something (especially when a big story is covered repeatedly in many places). It's nicer to just let the computer worry about it.
This is one of the big reasons I convert my social media follows into RSS (I just did bsky last night). I want an inbox!
For me, it doesn't feel like an obligation. It feels peaceful knowing I definitely saw everything I might care about, and that I delegated the tedious parts to a machine.
I thia is exactly what makes RSS great. You and me can both subscribe to the same blog/podcast/whatever, but choose different technologies that fit how we want to use it. That's something that could never really happen on traditional social media.