Gitlab-ce lets me push without a ssh key installed

So long story. I had Gitlab-ce version 12.x installed, and hadn’t upgraded for a long time, so I uninstalled it, cleared out the /var/opt/gitlab directory, and then installed the latest 14.4 version (on ubuntu 18) rather than go through all the intermediate version one by one.

The user has admin privilege’s on gitlab. I have not yet setup ssh keys on gitlab. I created a couple of projects and then imported the existing repo’s from my dev machine (win 10). I can push to the repo using git bash or sourcetree even though it shows the banner saying I can’t until I add ssh keys on the repo page.

The keys on the win 10 machine are the same ssh keys I used with version 12.

Why can I push to the gitlab server? It leaves me feeling like it is not secure, it is accessible to the outside world