According to Google Trends, during the past few years, there has been nothing but a few minor bumps that faded away as quickly as they came. I love RSS because i do not have to scroll through dozens of different news sites all day and i would love it to return.
EDIT: Typical case of people only reading the headline. I was asking why people are hyped over something that did NOT happen.
RSS readers are great and although they have falling out of favor, they certainly aren't dead. The fall in usage of RSS is directly correlated with the fall in the number of people reading blogs on a daily basis.
I'm not sure if RSS usage has really fallen. Most websites still have RSS / Atom feeds, and I hear about a lot more people getting into it these days. I'm sure the proportion of people using the internet who use RSS feeds has gone down a lot, but in absolute terms there might be as many users as ever? Maybe it's not quite at the heights it was when everybody was using Google Reader, I'm sure quite a few people gave up when that died. Though, if you count podcasts as RSS then it probably more than makes up for it!