Your code will return stringified references if any were part of the list it was passed. The code I wrote preserves references as references. It’s not a huge deal – after all, while you may sometimes want a list of unique references, it’s unlikely that you’ll want them sorted on the stringified value of the reference. But it might still save you from getting bitten somewhere else, depending on how locally the function is used.

Makeshifts last the longest.