BarryPT hi! Thanks for reminding me of this.
I was unable to find a way to do this with exchange on its own.
What I intended to try next, and have not yet had a time to fully explore, is leveraging one of the other platforms in O365 to mimic the Google groups functionally- creating a community either in Teams or Yammer.
I'm pretty heavily into Teams and SharePoint administration and have only scratched the surface of Yammer, but I still feel like the functionality is there, it just needs to be strung together with a Flow or some other type of automation that allows people to email an entire community at once, and then have others reply to that email by default to the same address.
Thank you for reminding me of it, I need to get back on this because I still have an email list that could use the benefit if I figure out how to make it work.