fix authenticated user negation

[leozhang14]

No specific ticket, just environment variable stuff

Only change was getting rid of a hardcoded authentication bypass

see victor's update

Checklist

• [y] My PR name is descriptive and in imperative tense
• [y] My commit messages are descriptive and in imperative tense. My commits are atomic and trivial commits are squashed or fixup'd into non-trivial commits
• [y] I have run the appropriate linter(s)
• [y] I have requested a review from the PL, as well as other devs who have background knowledge on this PR or who will be building on top of this PR