To give an example, they prioritize audio over anything else. Which makes sense because if you can't understand what the person is saying, you can't have a meeting. So they automatically downgrade or upgrade your video to try to keep latency decent on audio. Meet just has a manual setting where you can up or downgrade video or audio.
zoom sends proprietary stuff over web sockets instead. Which is also why they prefer you use their fat clients with native decoding
(disclaimer - I work at Google, but not on teams that build video chat software)
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/8/21214059/google-hangouts-m... you would be incorrect
It's mostly equivalent to Zoom, from my experience. Grid view, screen sharing, recording, chat, file sharing, phone dial-in, calendar meetings, etc. If you follow a GTM invite link it downloads the app and run its for you, so nobody needs to have the app previously installed.
It's also rock stable. I've had hundreds of meetings with GTM, and never had any audio/video issues, whereas Google Hangouts/Meet has always been really flaky.
The UI is initially confusing, but so is the UI for every video chat app I've used. It seems to be the fad to have "clever" UI in video chats apps (controls that auto-hide, non-standard icons, low contrast, non standard control placement (use the standard toolbar luke!) etc.
On top of that zoom has always "just worked". The "just worked" thing is now resulting in security woes, but still. Start a meeting, send link. Done. Online works, dial in works.
Contrast with hangouts (dropped non-chrome browser support for at least a year). To this day we have users that can't use slack video for unknown reasons (app store slack doesn't work as well as slack installer slack or something). WebEx is some horror show that seems to constantly re-install itself for each meeting. You're lucky if you can get it going before the meeting is over.
Where most apps stop at video chat and maybe poor quality screen sharing, zoom has a pretty deep enterprise feature set. Good webinar support, integration with SIP systems, SSO, recording etc.