This is for sure more of a "Clever" approach, but this totally makes sense in production if it is properly documented in comments.

It actually does not matter what you assign there. It is overriden in the tests anyway

Sad that this kata is easily solved by not even using refs, because the tests are not actually emulating user input on a form control, but rather hardcoding the value on the instance field.

But this is a nice try to create a React task, because there is so much tooling going on in the tests. I think there should be more of these.