In other words.. You accept OL is useless,shrug and move on. Because it's barely functional
to real world behaviour instantiated in proprietary standards used by 99% of the producers.
It's not a bizarre hill, it's detail below your concern but it's a real problem in his (and I suspect my) contexts.
So.. you can't use OL to construct RFC internal references automatically.
You can't reliably cut and paste an OL into another form and maintain exact semantic intent of the numbering structure.
What a bizarre swap of hill for swamp you prefer to live in: live with the terrible design choices and abuse another list form.
As another commenter said: "...use UL, unordered list, and insert the numbers into the text."