I believe the current intended use is a human-editable "manifest file" where you specify desires/intent, preferably semver, ideally only as necessary, and a mac

I believe the current intended use is a human-editable "manifest file" where you specify desires/intent, preferably semver, ideally only as necessary, and a machine-generated "lock file" which specifies the actual hash of every transitive dependency, so builds are fully specified and reproducible.