I think there is/are some executives at Google/Alphabet that utilize GV so much that they couldn't kill it if they wanted to. I used to have a voip device that worked with my GV number, and Google extended the life of the API used several years, I since stopped using that device and the service had still been working for it.

I do miss when GV and SMS were integrated with Hangouts though... was imo a much better experience than you get today with all the broken out apps.