Outlook for Mac directly opens Teams meeting links but I can't login as a guest

Greetings all,

  Our company hosts all our email via on-prem Exchange. I am a Mac user and consequently I use Outlook for Mac (16.40.20081000). Our company does not use Teams, therefore I have no Teams login.  But I support a lot of customers that send me meeting invites with Teams links. If I open the link by copy and paste into my browser it correctly launches the installed Teams app in guest mode and drops me into the meeting.  But if I click the link directly - opens the app to the "Getting Started" screen that I can not get past to get into the meeting:

I have tried several things suggested in the forums here including reloading my outlook and profile, deleting the Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Teams folder, and others. Nothing works. This is the dumbest behavior I have ever seen. Is there a fix for this or a workaround?  Can I get Outlook to just open the link directly in the browser somehow??