Orientation Support: Not showing consistently across editors in Row block

[apeatling]

Description

It's been reported that the orientation settings are not showing consistently. For example using the skatepark theme and adding a row block in the post editor results in orientation settings now showing at all:

Skatepark does not have anything in theme.json to hide these settings.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Activate the skatepark theme
2. Open the site editor
3. Add a row block
4. Notice that the orientation settings are unavailable.

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

Yes

[mtias]

The block is actually being inserted with the flag set to false in some circumstances. It also seems this should be a block / theme config not a block attribute.

<!-- wp:group {"layout":{"type":"flex","allowOrientation":false}} -->
<div class="wp-block-group"></div>
<!-- /wp:group -->

[andrewserong]

Just following up, the fix that @youknowriad put together in #39650 ensures that it's hidden in all cases for the Group / Row block — it looks like the "Transform to variation" should be used to switch orientation in this case, as the Group block needs to support floated layouts.

As of #39532 the visibility of the orientation control can be set per-block at the block.json level.

[mtias]

@apeatling @andrewserong @youknowriad thinking a bit more about this, I think the orientation should be showing for the Row block. There's nothing inherent about rows being purely horizontal, and there's value in a vertically organized flex container that do stuff like space-between, etc. Maybe we want the name of the block to change to "Stack" or something like that for extra clarity, but I feel we are lacking that option and Group on its own doesn't provide it, so the transform to variation menu doesn't make much sense.

[youknowriad]

@mtias I'm trying that in #39690

[apeatling]

"Stack" is common across other platforms (for example interface builder for iOS), and comes without the assumption of orientation. Thumbs up for that.