The more fundamental issue was that the first iteration of gPay was born from Tez, which was explicitly created by Google's NBU (Next Billion Users) team led by Cesar Sengupta out of Singapore, for the Indian market with UPI compliance. It was extremely well-received and that justified the investments to port it to the US and some EMEA markets. But those markets already had Google Wallet for storing cards and because of how siloed product teams historically are at Google, there ended up being parallel tracks for GWallet & GPay.

As far as I can tell, a couple of years ago attempts were made to merge the key features of the two, at which point there was a time where US users had access to both gPay & gWallet. Now, it's come mostly full circle and Google's got most of the non-P2P features from gPay into gWallet and is deprecating gPay.

It'll be interesting to see if they add P2P to gWallet. I like to think so, but on the other hand I'm perfectly happy continuing to have a half dozen (not quite) other apps for the same purpose. CashApp, Venmo, Zelle, Paypal, not to mention the other platform apps that have P2P built in.