The recent block references update to @RoamResearch has some interesting use cases.

first is Templating, which Matt Brockwell pointed out in Slack, here he's just typing ((2 by 2 table)) to get a table.

I tried this with Article/Books metadata. type ((t/Books)) on any page then click on the reference > "Apply Children as Text". This way by Clicking on Author references under Books you'll get a list of all book authors only. Same can be done with other attributes.

Similarly, clicking on Author attribute under Articles will show only article author in sidebar. I have a feeling this is obviously already possible via Filters (i guess for that the metadata would have to be in a certain format), can someone confirm?

Though, I don't know how useful this is, in some cases it'll be def useful, in case of Article/Book/Project metadata it may be risky because if you change/delete the original block, it'll break Metadata on all pages. example

It's been just a few hours since I updated, will post any new use cases for these new block ref tools(aliases etc.) in this thread. For templating, I think using text expander apps for most used/daily snippets (articles,books, daily pages) is still better.

for the rest like say a complex Table structure or Query ( #roamcult might know more), the above might be better as remembering a lot of text expander shortcuts isn't ideal & in Roam auto-completing references reduces that cognitive load.