I’m able to reproduce here on meta
Before refresh
After refresh
The numbers are indeed different but what’s more important is that we’re always doing two requests to the directory_items endpoint (one with, the other without the .json extension) but one of them has incorrect parameters 
I can’t however reproduce locally, I have two different requests, but they’re on different endpoints (groups/search.json vs directory_items)
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EDIT: enabling the user card directory theme component doesn’t change the issue/behavior.