toise

As far as I can tell, it’s basically accurate (although the pendulum unit was called the toise, and the meter seems to have targeted half a toise).

A livre[0] in one village was almost, but not quite, the livre used by the one only a couple toise[1] away.

They measured the distance between the Mediterranean Sea and the North Sea through Paris with platinum rulers measuring 2 Toise de Paris.

Once they had the distance in Toise de Paris and did some math they could define the circumference of the earth and define the meter at 1/40 000 000 of that.

From what I can tell, when they standardized the meter, they were specifically going for something close to half of a toise, which was the unit defined as two pendulum seconds.

The toise was different in different parts of France, so it was specifically the Paris one they used, and the goal was to get rid of local variants of the same units with vague definitions like toise, point, line, inch, feet, mil(e) etc.

The pendulum definition was actually something called a "universal toise".

If you take out the whole thing about the meter’s definition targeting half a toise, then all you have is “related to the circumference of the Earth”, and it would be a monumental coincidence if the mass of the earth and gravitational constant just conspired to somehow drop an unadulterated pi^2 out of the math.

No, that's not correct, that unit while intended to be a universal measure of distance never was called a meter (the "inventor" wanted to call it "toise universalle"), all that comes from the wikipedia page you linked to, so the only remaining question is whether you can call it the "original definition".