When I do not provide a require directive, apache 2.4 seems to ignore authentication and just lets the user access the url.
Is there way to turn off Authorization checks and only worry about Authentication? I want to know who is logging into my web page, while still allowing everyone access.
I don't think that is possible and I don't think that is how this feature was intended. You might want to implement something like that in your webapp.
You could try https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_authn_anon.html
To quote from that page:
Combined with other (database) access control methods, this allows for effective user tracking and customization according to a user profile while still keeping the site open for 'unregistered' users.
