I've been using gmail since the early beta days and was never aware of this functionality. But on closer inspection there appears to be a highly stylized (unrecognizable) camera icon there that takes me to, I guess the long lost cousin of Google Meet?? Why are these apps welded together? What a bizarre decision. I thought Meet went to The Graveyard along with Allo and Duo and Wave.

My work uses GSuite so I’m using Meet every day. I find it mildly useful to have the functionality built into the Gmail app but at the same time I see zero loss in having it be a separate app.

Meet was discontinued; its functionality was merged into Duo and the resulting app renamed to Meet.

Meet still works on Pixel phones as a solution/parity for FaceTime. I wonder if it's bundled in the web build or they're the same build under the hood.

That's something that I would (very generously) expect to add 5 megabytes.

The background images alone would be more than that.

We don't need that to be pre-loaded on the device, do we? how often are they used? and when one is set to be used, the user is definitely online already, just grab the one then

Yeah, meet and chat (where each has their own bloat) are now integrated into the mail app as well. This contributes a lot.