I see I'm in good company looking for a solution for this issue. This is a poor design choice which could have simply been made optional via a configuration setting rather than removing it entirely.
There are many, many valid reasons for letting users copy the entire chat stream with details in place. Not the least that the function existed already and people were clearly using it.
I work in the accessibility area and meeting participants will often provide very useful commentary via chat - some because of their own accessibility requirements. Other users need to copy the chat out to an external document to be able to access it in the way they normally work because of their disability. Removing the names and timestamps creates even more barriers for people with disability and removes important contextual information.
Giant thumbs down on accessibility and equity Microsoft!
Perhaps Microsoft could think about the collective time and money spent by MS clients trying to resolve this simple issue?
The suggested workaround does not work and is not a solution.
The "noise" has been replaced by "garbage" that requires even more time to reformat, amend and fix to be useful.
Please look at this seriously Microsoft and provide a solution that is effective.