Internal Groups no longer explorable by non-admin users

Summary

Prior to 15.7.x, Internal Groups were explorable by Internal users via the "Explore Groups" tab on /dashboard/groups. That tab is now "Explore public groups" and is strictly for Public visibility level. The only way to search Internal groups now is through the Admin menu.

It may have been intentional to default this tab to Public-only (at least according to @mksionek here), but there is a functionality regression for non-admin users. I have not been able to locate the exact MR where this functionality changed.

While the new Visibility filter in /explore allows searching for Projects of any visibility level, it only allows you to filter by Project name and not group.

Possible fixes

1. Re-add Internal groups to "Explore groups" tab
2. Add a tab for exploring Internal Groups on /dashboard/groups
3. Include Group name in the filter search on /explore
4. Rework /dashboard/groups to have feature parity with /explore for Projects, including the Visibility combobox

Proposal

Current proposal:

• Introduce a merge request that will remove this feature flag and return the previous functionality, except for gitlab.com: !113728 (merged)

• There is also a draft MR of an internal-only tab open in !113704 (closed) in case that is useful for future development.

Figma file