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It won't protect against a newer version of an established library introducing malicious behaviour.

This is correct, the few dependencies you would use would need to also target very specific versions to achieve the same.

Lock files are used to lock dependency versions all the way down your dependency tree, not just your immediate dependencies.

Unfortunately this seems to be the case; lockfiles would be unnecessary only if all your dependencies (and their dependencies, recursively all the way down) reference explicit versions, the risk being that a new malicious version would be published. I'll research if there's a workaround.

Thanks everyone for pointing out this issue.

In my opinion a lock file really is the "work around", I don't see a huge issue in using them since it's given for free by npm and yarn with no additional overhead.

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