Upgrading a package marked as hold, marks it as install in dpkg –get-selections

If I mark a package as hold with echo "xyz hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections and afterwards explicitly use apt upgrade xyz=1.2.3 the package is marked as install in dpkg --get-selections.

Is there any way to "permanently" mark a package as hold? – I want to update it, but always manually and never as part of another update.

I tried to look online, but there’s 100 posts that teaches you how to hold a package, I know that. I also tried man apt which sends you to man apt-get 8 but upgrade doesn’t really specify anything about hold-packages (or suddenly unholding them..) – so I’m also happy if you can provide resources about the behaviour.

It kind of tripped me a little when I upgraded 3 packages in a row, to a specific "not-latest" version, and .. the last one got the specified version, but the others were suddenly "latest."

I can see in the output that apt upgrade did show me that it was also going to upgrade the other packages.. I just don’t want to write a new script like..

upgrade(){
  apt-get upgrade $1=$2
  echo "$1 hold" | dpkg --set-selection
}

….. or is that the solution I’m looking for?

This question was originally posted on "askubuntu," but since it didn’t get any traffic they suggested that I deleted the question and posted it here.

A user did suggest using apt-mark. But it does not solve my problem it just simplifies holding packages.