Its at least consistent - which, IMO, is better than just getting a random version. I do, however, think it's a bit unfortunate that it prevents picking up bug / security fixes in transitive dependencies.

Imagine that you depend on library A of a particular version which itself depends on library B. With minimal version selection, as long you don't bump you dependency on library A (or some other library that depends on library B), you'll continue to get that same version of library B. But, then library B releases a critical security fix. With minimal version selection, there isn't a great way to pick up that fix. You can _hope_ that library A releases a new version that requires the fix - but that may or may not happen and could take a while. Or, you could add an explicit dependency on the new version of library B - which is unfortunate, since, your main package doesn't depend on library B directly.

Lock files solve this problem. You can depend on whatever version of library A that you need and lock the transitive dependencies. And once library B releases its fix, you can update your lock file without having up bump the version of library A.

Tools like poetry providing the features to automate this workflow.