To me, the Google "download all synced Chrome/Android *plaintext* passwords as a CSV" feature represents a dangerous single point of failure, and your security policies ought to prevent syncing.
No, you've always had to either sign in to the browser to enable sync or explicitly enable sync if it's set to reuse the web content sign in. Setting a sync passphrase (end-to-end encryption) requires going out of the way to enable it since if you lose that all sync data is lost.