The returned reference may be a partial object if the entity is not yet loaded/managed.
If it is a partial object it will not initialize the rest of the entity state on access.
Thus you can only ever safely access the identifier of an entity obtained through
this method.
The use-cases for partial references involve maintaining bidirectional associations
without loading one side of the association or to update an entity without loading it.
Note, however, that in the latter case the original (persistent) entity data will
never be visible to the application (especially not event listeners) as it will
never be loaded in the first place.