Why do we need to have a running experiment to use features? This feels confusing and also not practical, for me to test them I do not really need to have an experiment running but with these changes I am forced to.

How are you running experiments?

We definitely support feature flags by themselves (with no experiment). Simply create a feature flag in the GrowthBook app, apply any targeting & attributes (or skip this entirely for an always on/off flag), and implement in the SDK: https://docs.growthbook.io/lib/js#quick-usage

Well before all I had to do was create a feature, add the targeting conditions and turn it on, this is what we did to be able to use it. But now I can only turn it on or edit the traffic split if there is an experiment running. Basically before when creating a new feature we had the option A/B Experiment but now it is either New A/B Experiment or Existing A/B Experiment.

How are you setting up your forced value or rollout rules? Is this a flag that you're wanting to (eventually) link to an experiment, or just a standalone flag? For the latter, I was able to create a valid feature without referencing an experiment at all by using these buttons:

We did not used forced or percentage rollout before, only a/b experiment. I would say this change is more a surprise because the way we use to do our feature testing to confirm it is working is no longer an option because of what I mentioned. So you suggestion is to use percentage rollout to test?