I do think folks have also conflated the generic ability to read RSS with the specific social networking features of Google Reader, so it’s hard to know which they say they’re missing.
I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)
I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.