How to install latest stable Drupal version from drupal/recommended-project branch?
Instead of forking and running composer install, you should run composer create-project drupal/recommended-project &lt;project_root_dir&gt;. This will install the latest stable version of Drupal and you can of course add this to your version control system (don't forget to exclude all files that you don't have to track in your VCS).

When you use the composer.lock file from the GitHub repository directly, Composer installs the software versions as defined in the lock file (in this case the development versions).