Group of groups and variables

Is there a way to have a group_vars file for a group of groups? For example, I have

[qa-webservers]

[qa-dbservers]

[qa:children]
qa-webservers
qa-dbservers

[qa:vars]
some_var=asdf
other_var=fdsa

I’d like to put the QA variables in group_vars/qa.yml, but that doesn’t seem to be working. Is there any way to accomplish this?

That the group is just hosts or has other groups, should not matter at
all, this should work.

what version of ansible, python, OS? dir structure, etc?