I would like something like the Markdown options (of SO?), where
four leading spaces makes it look like code
blocks have been written
Google (Hangouts) Chat only supports basic (not rich nor full Markdown) formatting. For your specific inquiry, use pairs of triple backticks, i.e.,
```
Hello
World
```
For this and other formatting directives, see either the consumer help page (for end-users), or the format messages page (for developers) in Google's documentation.
For those who are developers and want to build Google Chat apps/bots, I was part of the launch team back in 2018 and produced some video content to help you get started:
@BOT
message.Ensure you're either pasting plaintext or force plaintext with cmd/ctrl
+ shift
+ v
(see comments below).