Geo: Document the difference in number of projects and project repositories synced by Geo

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As part of epic &17974, Geo is moving to enumerate project_repositories instead of projects for replication and verification of Git repos (see #546175). A ProjectRepository record only exists when a Git repository actually exists for a project, whereas every project has a Project record regardless.

This means the count of project repositories tracked by Geo will be lower than the total number of GitLab projects on an instance, and this difference is expected and correct. Without documentation, administrators may interpret this discrepancy as a sync gap or a bug.

What needs to be documented

  • Explain that the number of project repositories shown in the Geo site dashboard (and /admin/data_management/project_repositories) can be lower than the total number of projects on the instance
  • Clarify that this is expected: only projects with an actual Git repository have a corresponding project_repository record, and only those are replicated by Geo
  • Note that projects created without initialising a repository (e.g. via the API or Rails console without initialize_with_readme) will not have a project_repository record and will not appear in Geo replication counts

Note: this issue is blocked by #546175. Documentation should be written once V2 replication is in place, so it reflects the correct source of truth.

Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖