The Vitess Group Replication component was an experimental effort created by Yang Wu for Stripe. This effort was later abandoned and unused in production by Stripe. So there are no known users of VTGR today and nobody should use it for a new installation as it is now unmaintained and untested.

The Vitess Maintainer team does plan to revisit support for MySQL Group Replication in the future, but any future support would be implemented using a new approach.

With all of this in mind, we should officially deprecate this implementation in Vitess 17 and remove it in Vitess 18.