https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Cite strongly discourages using a wrapper template around the <references /> tag "for compatibility, performance, and functionality reasons". However, the English Wikipedia almost exclusively uses <references /> via the {{reflist}} template because it allows changing the list style and using pre-defined group styles.

If <references /> supported a liststyle= parameter for directly changing the list-style-type, and applied a CSS class based on the group= parameter to allow a site's common.css to automatically specify a list-style-type based on certain group names, the use of wrapper templates could be eliminated in most cases.