> And moreover, something already mostly solved algorithmically. Eg in zotero you can drag and drop files and it generates a reference based on the metadata as long as that is enough

As mentoned somewhere else, zotero's metadata retrieval is like 50% hit/miss in my experience - as in for the papers i've imported it was able to ID about half of them. An the quality of that data is not that great either. Lots of OCR errors, sparse bibtext fields, author names wrong, etc.