Skaffold and Gitlab image repositories - kubernetes

Question

This is my Skaffold config.
apiVersion: skaffold/v2beta19
kind: Config
metadata:
name: my-api
build:
local:
useDockerCLI: true
artifacts:
- image: registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api
docker:
buildArgs:
DATABASE_HOST: '{{.DATABASE_HOST}}'
deploy:
helm:
releases:
- name: my-api
artifactOverrides:
image: registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api
imageStrategy:
helm: {}
remoteChart: bitnami/node
setValueTemplates:
image.tag: '{{.DIGEST_HEX}}'
setValues:
image.repository: registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api
When I run Skaffold dev, everything works fine until I see an ImagePullBackoff error in pod logs. Here is a partial output of the log:
Events:
Type Reason Age From Message
---- ------ ---- ---- -------
Normal Scheduled 102s default-scheduler Successfully assigned default/my-api-node-55cf68d989-7vltw to kind-control-plane
Normal BackOff 21s (x5 over 99s) kubelet Back-off pulling image "docker.io/registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api:60ef7d4a463e269de9e176afbdd2362fd50870e494ff7a8abf25ece16c0d100c"
Warning Failed 21s (x5 over 99s) kubelet Error: ImagePullBackOff
Normal Pulling 6s (x4 over 101s) kubelet Pulling image "docker.io/registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api:60ef7d4a463e269de9e176afbdd2362fd50870e494ff7a8abf25ece16c0d100c"
Warning Failed 4s (x4 over 100s) kubelet Failed to pull image "docker.io/registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api:60ef7d4a463e269de9e176afbdd2362fd50870e494ff7a8abf25ece16c0d100c": rpc error: code = Unknown desc = failed to pull and unpack image "docker.io/registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api:60ef7d4a463e269de9e176afbdd2362fd50870e494ff7a8abf25ece16c0d100c": failed to resolve reference "docker.io/registry.gitlab.com/lodiee/my-api:60ef7d4a463e269de9e176afbdd2362fd50870e494ff7a8abf25ece16c0d100c": pull access denied, repository does not exist or may require authorization: server message: insufficient_scope: authorization failed
As you can see from the output, kubernetes adds docker.io prefix in front of my image repo address and so it can't find the image at that address.
Is this the normal behavior? Also this is a local development setup and I use skaffold dev to launch it, why does k8s try to go to that address?
Thank you.