There are discussions and confussion (on cs.wp) upon some articles and their references. Not everybody is able to say, what part of text the reference is for.
Thus the creation of ancors related to <ref> tags would help, that a user can format proper part of text for each reference. Than in VisualEditor it could be highleted by background or inline block border colors.
It would help editors in VisualEditor to work better with reference texts and not mix up section of texts belonging to the different reference.