Can the user read/export the lockfile in a portable format (e.g. requirements.txt)? I love the idea of magic like this, but I'm less keen if it comes at the price of lock-in. (And feel free point me to the docs!)
No magic, it's automating and hooking into existing open-source tools. For Python its poetry (https://python-poetry.org/), not requirements.txt because UPM needs to present strong guarantees on reproducibility -- otherwise things like content-addressable caching wouldn't be possible. Poetry is open-source and UPM is too: https://github.com/replit/upm
Every Replit Python project can be downloaded and you'll have the spec file and the lock file so you can install the same dependencies locally.