Fully agree with that. The free version is awesome as-is, but I pay for the premium one and it's one of the few subscriptions that I never think of canceling.
Recently I've been also using Inoreader to "subscribe" to YouTube accounts and I love it cause that let me cancel my YT account since I don't need it anymore
This was my go-to before switching to the self-hosted Miniflux and it's still my recommendation to anyone who wants a good RSS tool. The best one I've found since Google Reader.
I rocked tt-rss for 8+ years, self hosting. Very configurable for me and it was basically my youtube homepage. However I'll say that on more than one occasion the update was not trivial.
That's a wide open topic, but for self-hosted I use FreshRSS with Full Text RSS coupled to it to get the full text of feeds. For desktop, I like cross-platform open-source Fluent Reader (just did a video about it today in fact) - again because it pulls in full text and can still sync reading progress across devices through multiple services inc FreshRSS, Nextcloud, and others.