Docker – I am unable to authenticate my account to push images to GCP Artifact Registry despite having access. How can I move forward?

I have two accounts (user account and a service account).

• My user account ([email protected]) has ‘Owner’ Role.
• My service account ([email protected]) has ‘Artifact Registry Administrator’ Role.

Both of these accounts have their access set in the project that my Artifact Registry repository exists.

Now, the annoying part is, I cannot seem to authenticate Docker to push my locally built image to the Artifact Registry repository even when I used the gcloud CLI credential helper method in the docs.

Here’s what in my $HOME/.docker/config.json file.

{
    "auths": {},
    "credsStore": "desktop",
    "credHelpers": {
        "asia-southeast1-docker.pkg.dev": "gcloud"
    },
    "currentContext": "desktop-linux"
}

This is the error message I got.

denied: Unauthenticated request. Unauthenticated requests do not have permission "artifactregistry.repositories.uploadArtifacts" on resource "projects/project-id/locations/asia-southeast1/repositories/repository-name" (or it may not exist)

Steps I have used to push an image to my repository (Artifact Registry) in my project.

1.      gcloud artifacts repositories create repository-name 
            --repository-format=docker 
            --location=asia-southeast1 
            --description="DESCRIPTION" 
            --immutable-tags 
            --async

2. gcloud auth configure-docker asia-southeast1-docker.pkg.dev

3. docker build . --tag IMAGE_URL

4. docker push IMAGE_URL

I have done these steps locally on my terminal using the two accounts I have above.
Frustratingly, nothing seems to work no matter how I tried.
I also tried gcloud auth login and service account impersonation as well.

However, prior to all my failed attempts, I did manage to push the image ONCE from my terminal. But that’s it. It wouldn’t seem to work anymore. Can anyone help me please?