Explanation
The underlying issue for these users who don't see any of the accounts that were shared with the public group is that they are in profiles that have no access to the Account object. If a user does not have Read permission on an object in their profile or permission set, they cannot access any records of that object, regardless of any sharing rules or manual sharing. The page layout assigned to these users does not affect their record visibility, only their field visibility and layout. The permission set that only allows accounts in Active status does not affect their record visibility, only their record filtering. The accounts being owned by users higher in the role hierarchy does not affect their record visibility, as sharing rules can grant access to records owned by any user in any role.