It was absolutely absurd of them to kill NPAPI in Chrome and not update Talk / Hangouts accordingly. I ended up switching back to Firefox at work just so I could use Hangout video chats again.
I use video chats every day (on chrome canary os x) and never had an issue
It's also quite possible that the way they segment their product rollouts between public and Google Apps for Business accounts might have meant that we didn't get the update when I last checked it.
Using Chrome on Linux also might have something to do with it...
The switch to NaCl/WebRTC instead of the NPAPI plugin is what made Hangouts on Linux actually starting working for me.