You can join Meet calls without a Google Account.

Zoom also requires an account to log in.

Zoom doesn’t require an account. All you need is the meeting number and password to join a call.

And one of the recent Google meet offerings (not sure exactly which one but it was about a year ago) required an account before I could connect to the call. Perhaps it’s different now.

With Zoom it's optional, but the meeting creator can specify that it's mandatory so that you don't get drive-by bots.

Meet is annoying because I have to remember to sign out or open them in a private window if I don't want to leak details associated with the current gmail account logged in.