I just encountered an issue where all of my datasets are unable to refresh, showing an INTERNAL_SERVICE_ERROR. I raised an AWS case, and the reason is that the recent feature in Athena to not require an S3 bucket for query results is not supported by QuickSight.
QuickSight’s Athena connector still expects every workgroup it talks to have an S3 output location. When it doesn’t find one, dataset refresh fails with INTERNAL_SERVICE_ERROR, the documentation explicitly says The Athena workgroup must have an associated S3 output location. Refer this link.