FYI Using GoogleTalk after the "shutdown"

[P Holder]

So I don't know exactly what Google is up to with the GoogleTalk turn
down.  I doubt even they know what they're doing.

I just wanted to share what worked for me.  I found a couple of weeks
ago that my link failed.  I was expecting that, but I decided to see
if there was any work-around that worked for me.  I enabled 2FA on my
account, and then generated an App Password and used that with Pidgin.
To my somewhat amazement, it worked, and has continued to work now for
2 weeks.