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Yes a recovery partition is automatically created by default without asking you. You need to go out of your way to prevent the Windows installer from creating a recovery partition. This has been the case for all releases of Windows 10. (And also Windows 8 and 7 if I recall correctly).
However, the default size of the recovery partition has been gradually creeping up over the years. An early release of Windows 10 might have given you a 512MB recovery partition, whereas a later release would have defaulted to 1GB.
Sometimes in the past, Microsoft has been known to release updates which automatically regenerate the recovery partition, often in cases where the original recovery partition size is now too small to fit the newest requirements. It's not unheard of in some Windows computers to see a succession of multiple old stale recovery partitions at the end of your drive, each one gradually eating away a little bit more of your main system partition. Only the one at the "top of the stack" is actually in use anymore.
A more graceful solution would be to shrink the main partition by only the amount of extra space that's actually required, then grow the existing recovery partition (rather than create a whole new one), and finally install the new version of recovery in the newly freed up space; however that process would inevitably leave you temporarily in an transitional state without any working recovery at all -- and for risk mitigation purposes, I doubt Microsoft would ever take any action to make that happen automatically and unannounced.