I looked for such a tool a couple of years ago and did not find any. As other comments indicate, this one may not yet be fully general-purpose.

Could anyone here point me to an alternative? Something that generates rss or atom from HTML files, and called from the command line. Essentially, something like pandoc, but for rss.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but probably the core HTML-->RSS is in rss-bridge: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge