I have a pretty modest machine and zoom wins hands-down. It also "just works." I've had trouble getting non-technical people on hangouts/meet/whatever they call it today. Zoom "just works," and they've been responsive to peoples' concerns.
You can use Zoom in the browser. They "just" discourage it by using a dark pattern. The link for the web client is small and gray and the browser tries to open the desktop app automatically.
You can also join by phone, at least in some circumstances.
Yeah, which makes it a pretty annoying barrier if you want to make an ad-hoc call to someone. Sending a Meet link is more convenient. Plus, Zoom is pretty crippled on the web in the feature department.
Meet seems to work better on poor connections, but it does it with a significantly more CPU intensive codec (VP9?). As a result, it only seems to work well if you have a powerful CPU. If you have a weak CPU, Zoom seems to work much better.
My only experience with Meet on a weak CPU is my daughter using it for remote learning on her school supplied Chromebook which uses a Mediatek processor from 2015 which has 2 A-53 and 2 A-72 cores. Meet performs fine on the platform.
is it _better_ than zoom tho? I my experience, I don't see much of an improvement worth switching.