If you have an email workflow that you like then something like rss2email might be an option. You simply feed your incoming rss into your email. You’ll want to auto-tag (or otherwise organize) these emails to keep them separate from regular emails. Then you use your usual email tools to organize them further.
I’ve been using such a setup for the past 15 years.
Don’t think that this is true (unless we are talking about a fork that I am not familiar with). The FAQ has an entry on this and mentions that you need to use an external player. I use mpv and VLC.