Meet had that feature long before the pandemic? Certainly was using it when it was just branded "Hangouts" (no relation to the end user Hangouts) in like 2018.
Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year.
(Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)
I had used Meet in a Gapps context pre-pandemic, and perhaps due to the confusion you describe was unable to create a meeting in my GMail account and get a link for people to click on to join— the closest I could do was send them a calendar invite, and that was unacceptable.
Later on, it became possible to just go to meet.google.com and click "Start a Meeting".
Yeah, the interface with "Start A Meeting" was always there, but as far as I can tell, you had to know the special URL to bring it up - we found out about it on the google branded instructions on our hardware devices in the meeting room.
Google's loss was that they had pushed Meet (formerly Hangouts Meet, formerly "Hangouts, no the other Hangouts") as a business only thing while they were pushing Allo/Duo as the consumer apps and chasing the whatsapp/imessage market that year because of their addiction to launching a new chat app every year.
(Hangouts anecdote: In the early days, hangouts.google.com went to the more well known hangouts for users app which had a contact list UI and a different video call interface. There was another link on the same domain to go to the meeting listing/creation screen now at meet.google.com. I don't think there was any way from one to the other in the UI, Google had a g.co/hangouts link to get to it and I think the unshortened URL just had an extra underscore component in the path. I guess they were still on the fence over whether to launch Meet as its own thing or as part of old Hangouts, before they decided to shut down old hangouts)