For the record, on the larger issue, I think that the visual editor being unable to edit LDR articles is a very significant shortcoming. LDR is dramatically to work with when editing, especially for references that have a lot of parameters. Sure, old-fashioned references might just have a title/author/publisher/year, but nowadays a fully loaded citation template will have all that plus a URL, archive URL, archive status, paywall status, ISBN/DOI/other identifiers, via, and so on. A citation template for an academic paper can easily take up half a screen of text when source-editing, making it borderline impossible to keep track of what's going on when you edit, even for highly experienced users (even if syntax highlighting is enabled, which itself slows things down a lot). List-defined references eliminate this problem completely, and allow the source to just have a ref name tag, and the only reason we can't just use them for everything is because VE is busted and can't use them properly.

In T52896#11150788, @Alenoach wrote:

But this is only for instances of {{reflist}} where there are no additional parameters beyond the refs= list of references, correct? That is, {{reflist}} would continue to exist when being called with any other parameters.

Is this bug seriously twenty years old? Is there some reason we can't fix it?

Agreed.