[2021] Male Viera Without Owning Endwalker?

So I finally managed to log into the game and decided, for the sake of just checking, to see if I could edit a Male Viera character. Lo and behold, I could, apparently. I haven't pre-purchased Endwalker or anything, so I figured maybe it was just to let people make appearances and save the data.

But then it prompted me to select a world and log-in, and it let me fully create and log into the game with this Male Viera character. So now I'm confused. Do you actually need Endwalker to play Male Viera, or did they change it?