Not sure why people keep saying this. Right at this moment, you can go to hangouts.google.com, start a call, and everything still works. That's not to say that it's going to be around much longer, but it still exists.

And it's still better than the current product suite even with half of it killed.

Google originally said consumer hangouts was being phased out back in Jan 2019. Since then they’ve appeared to walk that back and are only phasing it out for GSuite users.

I’m definitely not holding my breath though.

Incorrect. I have the hangouts app, use hangouts in the browser under gmail, and use hangouts for video calls regularly.

Hangouts definitely still exists. I use it regularly. Hangouts.google.com and the Hangouts app. Maybe it will be axed soon, I don't know. But it does exist at this point.

Hangouts still exist, even though the nerfed a lot of the UX a couple years ago. My GV voicemail comes in via hangouts...

>hangouts doesn't exist anymore

This is very worrying because hangouts is the only thing I use. All of my contacts use hangouts except for a few SMS, and I heard about Slack.

And this is a mostly current or ex Google crew...