You're not the only one who's heard that take from someone. Someone else I once (regrettably) talked to insisted that only the first one was fake.
Their logic was that NASA knew how to get to the moon but knew they wouldn't beat the Soviets, so they faked the first mission to demoralize the competition and give them time to do a real moon mission after that.
And if Google had any sense, those were all improvements they should have just brought to Hangouts, haha.
But why improve a service when we can just create a competitor that does 2 things better, 5 things worse, and 1 crucial thing not at all?