This took me a while, but I solved an interesting problem in a #ProcessWire page I am updating.
I wanted to display all artist names (the children of a page "Artists") as ordered in the Admin backend, but instead of linking to those actual children pages (which serve as an index page for the artist), link to a relevant project of theirs … EXCEPT if it's a "news-item" page … don't show those.
references() method traverses and filters exactly as I had hoped!