This may be quite a large gap in my knowledge, but I have a fresh install of Fedora 39 Workstation. I noticed when setting up my firewall via firewall-cmd I do not need sudo for the command to succeed. I did read in a fedora document that “you can run firewall-cmd without issuing sudo with polkit in place.” There has been no authentication given to the terminal instance that I know of, so that shouldn’t be the case, right? I was under the assumption that firewall-cmd needs some type of authentication before running. I have checked other commands(dnf, systemctl, etc) and they do require sudo to run. I also made sure that the terminal was fresh from a reboot to not have any sudo commands before firewall-cmd. Is this just how it works or has something gone a bit off rails?
Well I found the issue. And want to thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I found the solution in:
sudo view /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.fedoraproject.FirewallD1.desktop.rules.choice
There is a rule added to allow users in wheel that do not need to sudo. Not sure I agree with that being added but it is what it is. Again, thank you for the help!