Protected branches in GNOME's GitLab

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

        Hello,
this might be a lame question, but this time I tried to read the
documentation first. I hope I didn't miss anything related to my
question. If I did, then I apologize.

When one wants to propose a change, aka create a merge request, in
GNOME GitLab instance, then it can be done only on a writable checkout
of the related project, which makes sense and is expected. It's similar
as requesting the person to create a bugzilla account to send patches,
thus it's fine. I also came through [1], where is written that the
lowest possible member level to create merge requests is a Developer.

Does it mean, that an automatically created user in GNOME's GitLab
instance, basically a complete stranger, receives the Developer
privilege, even when it's a Reporter (in bugzilla terms)?

Which branches are marked as protected in GNOME's GitLab? The master
branch is probably protected by default. Which are the other branches?
I definitely do not want to see a complete stranger modify stable
branches.

According to [1] I can mark/unmark branches as protected when I'm at
least the Master level of the project, but doing that each six months
when branching for stable feels like one more thing to easily forget
about, thus it would be nice to have some common "mark-as-protected
gnome-X-YZ branches when created", maybe on the same hook which sends
the messages to gnome-doc and such lists when the project creates the
stable branch, like in case of the most recent gnome-3.28. You've it
probably already there, I only do not know where to look for it,
neither I think I'd have access to it.

        Thanks and bye,
        Milan

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/permissions.html