Langchain was designed for chaining requests together, back when you had to maintain context with AI yourself. OpenAI figured a fix that works for both humans and AI - putting comms in a chat format, and so we didn't need to chain input.
Langchain was one of the earliest to RAG, but it was more of a hack and didn't do as well as many alternatives.
It seems like they're going into agents now. No comment but it feels like they're a step behind.