This scheme _can_ be made to work in the context of Cargo. You can have all of:

* Absence of lockfiles

* Absence of the central registry

* Cryptographically checksummed dependency trees

* Semver-style unification of compatible dependencies

* Ability for the root package to override transitive dependencies

At the cost of

* minver-ish resolution semantics

* deeper critical path in terms of HTTP requests for resolving dependencies

The trick is that, rather than using crates.io as the universe of package versions to resolve against, you look only at the subset of package versions reachable from the root package. See https://matklad.github.io/2024/12/24/minimal-version-selecti...