As parent noted, chat.google.com is the long term replacement, as you noted, Hangouts still works fine and no one's being pushed to Chat yet. It sounds like I'm being glib but you really are onto the nut of things once you've combined those two poles,
I agree, it is confusing! I wanted to make sure you meant 'chat in Gmail' before getting more specific: in that case, we are caught in a cycle of repeatedly noting Google has a deprecation timeline for cutting people over from Hangouts to chat.google.com, that's what the grandparent was referencing. It's virtually identical to Hangouts, just with modernized UI and Google sez a more stable backend. Everything works _just as it always has and will_ for your day to day user.
I agree, it is confusing! I wanted to make sure you meant 'chat in Gmail' before getting more specific: in that case, we are caught in a cycle of repeatedly noting Google has a deprecation timeline for cutting people over from Hangouts to chat.google.com, that's what the grandparent was referencing. It's virtually identical to Hangouts, just with modernized UI and Google sez a more stable backend. Everything works _just as it always has and will_ for your day to day user.