Google Talk evolved into Hangouts which then evolved into Chat. It's all one continuous line with a terrible marketing strategy. From what I can tell, Meet seems to be just a confusing way to access Hangouts video chats.
I can still see all of my Talk/Hangouts/Chat history going back years. Removing XMPP sucks, and I was annoyed by that too, but the chat history is still there.
Chat history matter a lot, really.