RSS client apps can still connect to managed services, so not sure what you are talking about.
In my case I'm using Reeder and it's just talking to the Miniflux server. So the server keeps all feeds refreshed all the time and the client app just fetches them from there. Just like Email being fetched from the server over IMAP.
No, that was you. Take a look at your comment:
>>> Which part of Google Reader was the one that no other tools came close to?
>>> There's almost as many good and different RSS reader clients as Todo list apps