No, your assessment is pretty accurate. I've only encountered refs once in the wild, and only because it was too much hassle to refactor working code to use an

No, your assessment is pretty accurate. I've only encountered refs once in the wild, and only because it was too much hassle to refactor working code to use an atom. It turns out that updating a single storage point in an atom with a CAS serves 99.9% of use cases, and is much, much simpler than ref-based code.