I have no idea why it’s taken me so long, but I’ve “discovered” #Redlib as a way to view #Reddit without all of the cruft. #selfhosted of course. https://www.macklin.co/redlib-reddit/
You can use Redlib to create an #RSS feed, which you can process in #Huginn to create a new version of the feed that includes the comments as well as the original post. Just right for using in your favourite rss news reader. https://www.macklin.co/redlib-via-huginn/
Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.