It's basically a form of reference-counted data access as I understand it.

If the code here operates with a bit of data from some container, the container will ensure that this bit will persist until all references to it are gone even if the bit is removed from the container.

Depending on the datamodel this may be handy or even required. Consider some sort of hot-swappable code when both retired and new code versions running in parallel at some point. That sort of thing.