I interviewed at Google a while back for an SRE position working with the Hangouts team. My first interview was in another office and the audio in Hangouts session would not start. We ending up having to move on to the next interview. I'm not surprised even Google employees don't use it.
There was a running joke (out of frustration, really) back when I was at Google (2013) that Hangouts was happily adding hundreds of new emoji, yet did not consider "reliable message delivery" to be a key feature.
Some of this is consumer vs. enterprise tension, though. Emoji demo really well on an initial product tour; reliability is one of those key features that's really hard to get people excited about, but which people hate to find lacking.
"Nearly a decade has passed since we built the first prototype. Face-to-face collaboration is ingrained in Google’s DNA now—more than 16,500 meetings rooms are VC-equipped at Google and our employees join Hangouts 240,000 times per day!"
Hangouts Meet actually works very well overall. I work at Google and almost never have problems with it.
Hangouts Chat, on the other hand...well okay, it seems reliable enough, doesn't have that problem that old Hangouts did. Comparing the UX to Discord just makes me sad though.
This has been my experience as well (with some relatively large Hangouts Meet meetings in a big G Suite org). Compared with old-fashioned Hangouts, Meet is pretty reliable.
