BUT you always had to use GPG (or some other keyring) and NOT SSH. Which is silly because you are already using an SSH key to access the git repo. This pull request adds support for SSH. So there is no second key system to deal with.

When sops was release it was the first tool to safely store and manage secrets within a git repository. It basically stores a file with all the secrets encrypted. You can share access to multiple users via their public key.