I’m not sure if this is a known issue or not, and not sure where to check if it is.
I use kbin to post to communities on beehaw and lemmy. One post, in a gaming community on beehaw, had a moderator come in a lock comments. Only…they weren’t showing as a moderator of the community on the page in kbin, and I was still seeing options to reply to all comments. I replied to the moderator as a test, and it was still possible to comment….kind of. My reply showed up on kbin, but it wasn’t on beehaw. That seems less than ideal when it comes to moderating.
Looking at the existing moderation tools on kbin, I don't think locking exists on kbin yet? The ones I can see are "ban", "pin", "delete" marking as NSFW and changing the language.
It's an open source project so you're in luck! Submit your own pull request so it can be reviewed and included! If you've not the skills to do so then you'll just have to have patience. :)
I think it's less that "developers think this is okay", and more that this was an alpha stage project prior to the Reddit meltdown and influx a couple of months ago, and they've been working their asses off to keep the site up and stable, and are working to evolve the functionality to meet the need as soon as practical/possible.