I've been trying to get so many of my friends/family to use Jitsi instead of Zoom throughout the pandemic. Usually the response is, "Oh this is great!" And then they're back to using Zoom the next day because they're used to hearing "zoom" as a verb. Zoom did an incredible job marketing itself into a trend.
WebRTC with NAT traversal is a mature technology now.
The problems are a) making the client ultra-reliable and just work for regular users (Zoom's main USP imho), and b) someone needs to host the service for rendezvous/signaling, and to TUN the long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal doesn't work. There is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed Internet.
> and to TUN the long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal doesn't work. There is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed Internet.
The bigger problem, which affects all nodes even if they can establish direct connectivity, is just the bandwidth requirements of true P2P videoconferencing once you have more than a few participants in the meeting. People often find out that even a connection marketed as "1Gbit fibre" likely has unacceptable loss/delay/jitter once they try to transmit, say, 50Mbit/s of UDP at a high packet rate to a variety of international destinations at the same time.
And another question:
Since most users nowadays sit behind a router that only allows outbound connections - how do Zoom users connect to each other?