I personally use and enjoy Homebrew for most of my development tasks. The thing I would not use it for is to exactly simulate a specific combination of tool versions.

Yes. The package manager's job is to give you some sensible version of some useful common standardized thing(s) you want to use. There might well be some legacy/current/edge options, but overall you are putting your trust in their judgement and assuming that they'll do something at least vaguely sensible.

If you want something specific than that: the package manager cannot help you here. This is no longer some random thing that you just use; it's one of your product's honest-to-goodness dependencies. You can't outsource this any more. You need to make your own arrangements to ensure that the specific version required is in use.