Shemja

I didn't have problems locking and unlocking when making new lines with the same brush, or even copying and pasting these. It's just these particular layers. I'm going to chalk it up to a fluke isolated to these layers and hope it doesn't happen again.
Thanks for all the troubleshooting help.

Correct.

Interesting ... but neither should be required to unlock those 2 layers, so there is something very weird going on that prevents a simple click on the Lock icon in the Layers panel from working.

From my cursory examination one thing stands out. The lines are "dotted" lines, they are made with a Brush. I have no idea what brush. Regardless, that should not affect the locked status problem.

No, and if I copy them into another document the lock is released to function normally.
No.
Long story short, I got around it by copying and pasting the lines into the same document and deleting the locked ones. No problems after that. I just wish I knew what happened so I don't accidentally do the same thing again. Maybe it was a fluke.

No, and if I copy them into another document the lock is released to function normally.
No.
Long story short, I got around it by copying and pasting the lines into the same document and deleting the locked ones. No problems after that. I just wish I knew what happened so I don't accidentally do the same thing again. Maybe it was a fluke.

Here you go.
Locked Lines.afpub

The dotted lines labeled in the layers panel as Dotted Lines. They will not unlock for anything.

With the text frame selected you always can use the Toolbar button "Revert Defaults" to get rid of recently used style properties and back to the current app defaults. Once it got clicked for such a text frame also a future text frame won't have the unexpected style.

It may depend / wouldn't really help: Imagine you start scrolling at a "safe" spot of a panel but then reach an area where the cursor position hovers a field. It might stop scrolling there + change the value instead. Well, it might be solved if panel scrolling would rule over value scrolling, means value fields could be ignored when the panel gets scrolled already.
Personally I'd prefer the wheel would work to scroll through every panel, not just some, I still just try scrolling intuitively in all of them (don't have in mind "ah, it has values, scroll doesn't work"). – At least the wheel should work on the scrollbars in these panels according to common computer UI design.

As it is (& always has been!) changing field values with the scroll wheel only works if the pointer is positioned directly over one of those fields, so there is no good reason not to allow scrolling the panel if the pointer is positioned anywhere else in the panel than in those relatively small areas.

You're absolutely correct that it's Publisher, not Designer. I corrected my post and updated which menus do and don't scroll for me. Thank you.

In Publisher 2 on Mac desktop, when I added a table and tried to use the setting in the studio sidebar (pinned in the studio), it showed the scrollbar but would not scroll with my mouse wheel. I had to drag the scroll down to see the rest of the menu.
At first I thought the other menu scrollbars work fine, but I was incorrect. I can scroll with the wheel on Layers, Text Styles, Quick FX, Pages, and Assets, but not in Paragraph, Text Frame, Character, Pinning, or Table.
Also, sometimes my horizontal scroll does not appear on the bottom when my image is zoomed in.
Ideas what's going on?

Welcome to the forums.
It looks like you have chosen to apply a Stroke to your text (see Stroke panel in your screenshot) and, further, that you've selected a textured stroke (last icon on the first line of that panel). Perhaps you need to click the "x" icon on that same line, toward the left just after the word Style.