Yes this is a major bug in the process. I came to the comments to say this as well.
They say this but do the exact opposite as you point out:
> The --frozen flag ensures the lock file doesn’t get updated. That’s exactly what we want because we expect the lock file to have a complete list of exact versions we want to use for all dependencies that get installed.
It's not a major bug, check my reply in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44370311