It's kind of mind boggling they'd decide to do that - the replacement they direct me to (Google Chat) doesn't even have feature parity so I just dropped them and moved my social circle using Hangouts to a different app (since at this point they all faced the same problem and we decided on a different platform).
I'm really curious how the A/B testing for this went down - Google is willingly throwing customers away because somebody wants to pump numbers for a new app that is objectively worse than the old one.
At this point Google Maps is the only product that is keeping me with them, but even that one is beginning to wear thin.