There was also a period in the history of Pocket where they had influential people share their stories, and shared the top stories on the Web. It was these things that I loved about Pocket. It was a fairly easy way to get a view on the most interesting stories that other people were talking about.
I have had such a hard time finding replacements for this workflow. I built an RSS Reader into Omnivore (Separate from their implementation) to try to emulate it, but it obviously wasn't the same.
Pocket had a lot of potential, and in an era of fragmented media companies - and the paywalling of everything I really think there was an interesting business model around unifying things or acting as a quasi-publisher.
It could have been so much, and in the end it just died. Mismanaged. It's a sad story.