Bleam scanner is an inverted Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon communication protocol. In the inverted communication scheme beacon serves as a scanner, taking this role from a phone that in its turn is responsible for advertising. The main benefit of such a design approach is its ability to function extensively in the background, monitoring RSSI levels. See: https://github.com/Connax-Oy/Bleam-Scanner-2
Well it seems that Google Beacon platform is depreciated from 01th April onwards. But yes, indeed Nearby Notifications used to be the part of Android OS, also Chrome browser before prior to it. Google apparently was searching for a new scalable ad business, but the beacon reality hit hard.
I've used to test Nearby Notifications on Android 8 if I remember and they were working well the obvious problem was the lack of adoption, but from the OS side it was awesome. Of course you had to open eg. Google Maps to make it work.
Here we have a different story of reversed scanning, enabled by mobile SDK. And as I see, GitHub is quite active, protocol V3 will be out on 1st June.