You missed the point by two miles. I still use Hangouts, but they’ve introduced 12 other apps in the last 10 years that do the exact same thing. All while making Hangouts / google chat / gTalk (whatever it was originally called in Labs) worse.
Google is good at a lot of things. Messaging strategy is not one of them. HN just hates Google doing well in anything so the expected harping on messaging.