It is step in right direction, but the workflow with group instances is still not smooth as it could be, eg in 2.8:
- can’t edit group in place (you are always taken into group original position, rotation, but still better than 2.7 series , where you had to search for original group manually),
- afaik, you still can’t bake groups instances into textures,
- no way to make (sub)groups instances unique,
- no way to split group into subgroups (make duplicate reals - always splits group with all nested subgroups into atomic object parts).
- I do not see way to isolate edited group, or its parents like in GP. This helps a lot in complex scenes.
It is hard to tell, how much work will go into developing Group instances in 2.8, maybe devs will address some of those issues.