Login and license key required for serverless v4?

Yes. Every where you run “sls …” has to have “sls login” done or an environment set. You can have unlimited users, even in the free tier as I understand it.

Our problem is you can’t migrate a single project/client from v3 to v4, it’s all or nothing : Serverless 3 & 4 together

At some point Serverless are going to update their Chocolatey package from v3 to v4 and break everything.