[arrakeenrevived]

This is pedantism, and is also just wrong. "if you have the right key" IS authentication. Encryption keys are used as a form as authentication all the time, it's one of the main use cases of public/private key encryption. I challenge you to explain how OpenSSH does non-password authentication without referring to encryption.

Authentication just means proving who or what you are. Secret keys, whether they be passwords or encryption keys, are one of the primary ways to do this. Just because the key is also used for something else in addition to, or as part of, that process doesn't change it from being authentication.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Well, regular WG authenticates at the host level (roughly), not the user level, which can matter. I think this actually does auth at the user level, but there is some nuance there.