I’ll pipe in here. I tried twice today to locate this feature and completely glanced over it so many times that I didn’t actually think it existed. It seems redundant to me because there are already tons of ways to express yourself in a user card, and I don’t think these badges add much at all.
I had to dig around here to find it:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/selecting-a-user-card-badge/22985
In that topic there’s a lot of confusion as to how to change the badge and similarly a translator had similar confusion on what the feature actually did.
I think the fact that they add little value and have proven to be complex, confusing, and non-obvious warrants the removal/deprecation of these. 100%.