I think you may be viewing history through slightly rose-tinted glasses there - I used pre-MS Skype a lot and it was never anywhere near as reliable as Zoom is

I think you may be viewing history through slightly rose-tinted glasses there - I used pre-MS Skype a lot and it was never anywhere near as reliable as Zoom is and didn't support group video chat at all. And the fact that it was P2P meant that some features that everyone would expect to work these days (offline messages, mobile support) were simply not possible at all.