What's your definition of faux-hard?
Personally, any variant does indeed make Dordle much harder (especially if four letters are locked by guess 3).
Anecdotally I tried "(d)[o]ily" > "c[o]re(d)" > "p[o][u][n][d]" > "s[ound]" > "[mound]"... and was lucky the correct guess wasn't "hound" or "wound" because that would leave me with nothing for the other column (in this case, "do[i]ly", "co(r)(e)d", "(s)ound" gave me just enough to guess "(ar)[ise]" > "[raise]".
If any kind of "letter lock" is implemented, an extra guess slot should be added.