An rss reader is a user agent (ie. a software acting on behalf of its users). If you define rss readers as a bot (even if it is a good bot), you may as well call Firefox a bot (it also sends off web requests without explicit approval of each request by the browser).
Their point was that the RSS reader does the scraping on its own in the background, without user input. If it can't read the page, it can't; it's not initiated by the user where the user can click on a "I'm not a bot, I promise" button.
