Similar to what we did for lazily loaded images we should run some webpagetest jobs on a static page with references stripped. This will give us an idea of the impact of change and will allow us to determine whether there is value in pursuing T125897.

• Generate static file for Barack Obama page uploaded to https://en.wikipedia.org/speed-tests for a page with references stripped and images lazily loaded
• Generate static file for Barack Obama page uploaded to https://en.wikipedia.org/speed-tests for a page with references in page HTML and images lazily loaded
• Upload pages to operations/mediawiki-config
• Run webpagetest jobs to compare the two scenarios

To generate these pages you'll need to stage a config change change on one of the X-Wikimedia-Debug machines that enables.

'wgMFLazyLoadReferences' => [
       'default' => [
              'base' => false,
              'beta' => false,
       ],
       'enwiki' => [
              'base' => true,
              'beta' => true,
       ],
],

See https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/X-Wikimedia-Debug#Staging_changes

The resulting pages should be uploaded to:
https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-mediawiki-config/tree/master/docroot/wikipedia.org/speed-tests