Google rebrands or changes entire apps at a whim. I’m shocked they haven’t ruined Google Apps (Workspace) with their changes.
Yes, it was originally named "Hangouts Meet", and was renamed about a year ago to remove "Hangouts" from the name. It's still the same app, though.
On the subject of hangouts, I miss Hangouts Dialer which was killed earlier this year. Used it to call international phone numbers.
Do you use it in Chrome? I have tried chrome and Firefox but they both make my fans spin for one video stream and four audio streams. Zoom's native app OTOH seems to handle multiple video streams with ease. This is on macOS.
Google apps use VP9 for video, and Apple didn't expose VP9 decoding acceleration via Video Toolbox up until Big Sur (on models capable doing so, so for Intel chips Kaby Lake and newer). So if you don't run Big Sur on KBL+, it falls back to software.