NetNewsWire supports multiple methods for accounts – local, various cloud services, and self-hosted. And it is free. I highly recommend someone interested in RSS check the app out and subscribe to a few feeds.
Hosting your own FreshRSS instance is totally optional, and is absolutely a proper option for someone privacy-focused. It doesn’t have to be a big, scary monster – simple options exist, e.g., using fly.io to host FreshRSS, as someone wrote about on this blog.