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.
Thank you for agreeing with me.
Big companies have many blind spots. There is nothing new here.