Hopefully they'll improve the reference system and multilingual support. But if you want a simple number for a reference, you can call "ref(<label>, supplement: none)", or if you want this to be the default for the @label shorthand syntax you can set it globally with "#set ref(supplement: none)".
Also typst knows the type of the referenced element. It's easy to write more elaborate rules that behave differently depending on the type. And the rules can also check the current language to generate localized references.
I played with this briefly, and saw that supplement can also take a function, which presumable how you make @wibble return '(34)' instead of 'Equation 34'? The function is passed the equation itself, so supplement: x => x makes the reference identical to the whole equation (!), but it wasn't obvious to me how to extract just the equation number from an equation x?
This is a really common idiom in mathematical writing: "from (1) we see that..." instead of "from Equation 1 we see that". (Randomly capitalising 'Equation' here is another controversial implication of using a fixed word string as a supplement.)
Agreed it could be improved fairly easily at this early stage, and even documenting 'standard recipes' would help. But I do think as a default, prefacing with a fixed string with fixed capitalisation is probably the wrong choice vs earlier systems which simply insert the reference number/letter itself and allow the user to word things correctly around that. Trying to make it do the right thing in context in a way that generalises across multiple languages is unnecessarily hard.
Also typst knows the type of the referenced element. It's easy to write more elaborate rules that behave differently depending on the type. And the rules can also check the current language to generate localized references.