Photos Recently Deleted Album has a lock

You are correct, the locked Recently Deleted items is a new feature. I have the same thing and I didn't going through any Photos migration like you did.

Press CMD + comma to get to the Photos Settings screen.

At the bottom of the General tab is a Privacy checkbox that says "Hidden and Recently Deleted albums will require authentication to access their contents". Go ahead and uncheck the Privacy setting to remove the lock and the password requirement. You'll need to have something recently deleted, if there are no deleted items you won't see the Recently Deleted view.

There are now two locks in Photos 8 on macOS 13 Ventura:

• The Hidden album is locked, so we can keep our hidden photos private.
• And as Hidden photos would become visible in the Recently Deleted album, after we delete them, this album is now also locked. But more important, the lock on Recently Deleted will prevent other people from deleting our photos just for fun. Many users reported here, that their children or other people had deleted them their photos from Recently deleted, when they got access to the computer.

Such pranks will now no longer be possible, with Recently Deleted and Hidden locked.

Just do not give your password away. This new feature is even more important on the iPad and iPhone, where we have to allow others to hold the devices, when we want to show them some photos.