I run a sports forum. For live games I’ve started enabling the chat on he topic we create for each game. I have folks that join the chat and folks that post in the topic during the game.
It could be interesting for a hybrid where posts/chats are shared. So the chat has everything the topic has and the topic has everything the chat had. Cross posting and chatting. Not sure if I explained that well or not, but hopefully it came across.
I see it as a on or off kind of thing to be enabled at the topic level.