Programming

What's the use for having update feeds in a unified format when I still have to go to each fucking site to view the full text

This has nothing to do with RSS, it is the author's choice. It's like someone who posts links to their articles on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, same thing. The platform doesn't prevent you from putting the entire content there, and in fact, many do, especially with RSS.

One benefit of RSS though is that because it is an open protocol, the problem you mention already has solutions, which auto fetch the articles for you. That wouldn't be possible without an open protocol like RSS

Moreover, I'd argue even with that, RSS is still a huge plus. To have all your content's headlines in one UI, and potentially you can filter or sort them however you want, that's pretty awesome.

RSS works great for me though.

I have an app on my not-so-smart phone to read news when commuting. It is not a long journey so I just want to have a quick glance at the headlines and read the actual articles that I want to. There are only 6 sites that I am interested, but still will take quite some work to crawl from the proper websites. RSS in turn is unified so I don't need to worry about their website layouts, formats, etc. It also gives me an URL to the actual content which I can use readability/reader mode library to parse and further reduce unnecessary contents.

Quite the opposite, I hope more informational sites offer/keep RSS! (Some removed RSS typically after a revamp, design change)

The content of the feed depends on the content creator, not on RSS.

Miniflux is likely to tick most of your boxes. It's self hostable and can download the full article without extra clicks / having to visit the source.