It turns out that long-range sat-to-sat connections are actually really hard to do. SpaceX hasn't figured them out yet, and neither has any other LEO provider. The people who have figured them out are at MEO and higher, where you can have fewer satellites and they can be a lot more expensive, and they don't have any tricks: they just throw money and power at the problem.
They were figured out in ka band rf for iridium 24+ years ago, just at not very high data rates. For quite some period of time the entire iridium network worldwide talked to terrestrial networks in only two locations, Hawaii and Arizona.
I'm not sure what you mean by meo operators figuring them out because the only current noteworthy meo operator is o3b and their satellites are bent pipe architecture.
Oneweb satellites, which is presently an incomplete network, also do not implement satellite to satellite data links.
