Using withTracker with a forwarded ref

I need to pass a forward ref to a component wrapped with withTracker(), to be able to call a method on the component.

I found quite a number of PRs and issues on the Meteor repo for this, like this one:

but all seem to point to each other, and it’s pretty unclear if this has ever been implemented (and how). The docs also don’t mention this.

So, how can I actually forward a ref in this scenario?

I could resolve this by updating react-meteor-data from 1.0.0 to 2.1.0. However, this was only possible by updating the whole Meteor app from 1.8 to 1.10.2, due to lots of dependency mismatches. Not sure if this will have additional side-effects.

Is there a way to do this on older Meteor versions, i.e. with react-meteor-data@1.0.0?