As many have noted, the badges are back.
Just for those who are curious, as noted in this post, the element we expected to be rendered on page was no longer being rendered.
Looks like the element isn’t rendered unless the group has a flair (Discourse calls them this, we call as badges) icon (basically just an image) uploaded.
For those who are web savvy, we stylize the badge purely with CSS (background color, size, content, text et cetera) instead of using images. We do it this way since its way more efficient to do it in CSS than create and upload ~180 icons (60 levels * 3 subscription plans). And we relied on the avatar-flair class element on the page to do it.
Anyway, the fix was to upload a placeholder group icon which forces the .avatar-flair element to render.
There was some other changes Discourse did, like CSS class names, but that was easy to address.