"You are not allowed to push code to protected branches on this project." using ssh deploy keys when key owner isn't allowed to push

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one of our pipelines is using an ssh deploy key to push to a gitlab repository.

it is pushing to a protected branch but the deploy key is allowed to push there:

the user which owns the Deploy key recently got removed from the project which caused the pipeline to fail:

is this intentional that a deploy key isn't able to push here even though it has explicit permissions to do so?