Is kiali in view_only_mode by default?

We are currently looking at making Kiali available to clustomers to view application traffic and help with troubleshooting, but we do not want them to be able to modify istio configuations.

I followed the documentation at https://repo1.dso.mil/big-bang/product/packages/kiali/-/blob/2.6.0-bb.0/chart/values.yaml?ref_type=tags#L623 and I do see the view_only_mode: true in the kiali cr:

When trying to validate the behavior is working as expected, I am not seeing any behavior difference between the cluster where we have this enabled, and a cluster where we don't

Is Kiali working in a view_only_mode by default? If not, any guidance on how I would test this? This is with big bang 2.50.0, kiali 2.6.0-bb.0