That doesn't do ActivityPub (or ATProto) justice. The inverse would be "more complicated RSS". But it is way more than that. You get semantically meaningful typed messages on AP. Most people think of AP as what you get on the fediverse, where basically the only type in use is the ActivityStreams Note object. But it can be anything that is transferred in a standards-conform interoperable way.
Yes, this works if your RSS server has its own DNS record that you control, and is essentially what the Domain Handle -> DID indirection gives you in AT Proto.
What Bluesky and AT Proto in general do is make it easy for people to either get a domain (a *.bsky.social subdomain) or use their own as their handle.
And AT Proto also lets you change your domain while preserving your identity, since the actual identity is a DID.
That makes it very easy to move your data and your handle around and not lose followers. If you change your RSS server's domain name, your subscribers don't come with you.
If the PDS URL is dead, is there a way to find the new canonical PDS? I guess you can theoretically index every log from everywhere and just look for new entries signed by the same key? But there would be no way to know if you have the latest posts without the PDS address.