Not controlling transitive deps makes this vastly less useful because direct deps can specify version ranges (e.g. latest minor version). Personally I'd stick with pnpm's feature.

This is why one should pin all direct and transitive dependencies with their checksums and not upgrade everyday willy-nilly. There is no need to specify the specific version numbers of transitive dependencies, if one keeps a lock file that pins those exact versions and checksums of transitive dependencies, and one doesn't upgrade willy-nilly all the time. Make upgrading dependencies a conscious choice, and perhaps have a policy of at most upgrading every X days.