I'm still not 100% clear on what zoom solved that led to such a surge in popularity. I'd used WebEx and other tools for work for years and they always seem "good enough". I probably prefer Zoom, but am not sure it improved life _that_ much...
There were alternatives... But Skype was getting worse by the day, moving from decentralized to MS servers for all calls, and support for everything besides MS and the official App was also non-existant.
Google Calls/Hangouts/Meet/? was mistrusted by all MS shops (and still is)
Teams was nowhere it is right now beginning of the pandemic, and required buying into the Ecosystem.
In fact, Zoom was a (!) low entry, mostly platform-independent solution that was easy to set up if you had nothing to start from. And joining a call was not asking much from customers, students, business partners, etc.
All the competitors learned a lot from Zoom and we take these things for granted now.
There were other solutions of course, but sometimes you're lucky, and ads help.
I literally don't think I ever had an issue getting on a WebEx call, using it many times a week every week for as many years as I can remember. Not that I'm passionate about WebEx, it just so happens to be the tool we used before we used Zoom.
Edit: Hope that didn't sound argumentative - was not my intention
Little things matter. When I send a zoom link, it is ~20 characters and I can alternatively just give you a room number.
When I send a MS Teams link, the invite is 5 line long with hundreds of strange characters in the middle.
In my personal life, um... video chat with many people is not really a part of it. I just used Google Duo/Meet when needed.
if your company is on microsoft and you want to arrange a meeting with people at a company that uses google apps, you have to decide on which company's video call platform to use. and inevitably, if your company's video call platform is used you'll have to help the people at the other company figure out how to use your platform, and you'll have to apologize for any connection issues. so the best solution was to use a new app that wasn't the one any party in the meeting used.