Hot take - who still actually uses the actual chat features for general conversation in the dev community?

How do you define general conversation? I have used the Gemini web chat yesterday to review and generate a report about multiple credit card statements.

depends what you mean. I regularly ask it to explain stuff, terminology I don't recognize etc. I also ask it about neat things it did, terminal commands etc so I can do them when I want to. That's chat in some sense, no? its not all "write this code"