What problem does this address?

Currently, ExternalLink renders an icon after the link text like WordPress ↗. Sometimes we want to render the link in places where we don't need/want the icon to be shown. For example, when we want to represent a preview for Social posts where the hyperlinks represent what they look like in Social media posts.
That use-case is not possible with the current version of the component.

What is your proposed solution?

The solution might be to add a prop like showIcon set to true by default, or hideIcon to render the icon conditionally.