https://ideas.litium.com/ideas/L-I-94 was marked as shipped, with the Link field suggested as the solution for selecting variants. However, the Link field is not limited to variants and therefore cannot fully replace a pointer field for this use case.
For example, when building a product listing or another feature where users should only be able to select variants, the Link field also allows users to select other entity types, such as media files.
This could be resolved by either:
Allowing the Link field to restrict which entity types can be selected.
Adding support for selecting variants in Pointer fields.
Either approach would make it possible to create fields where users can select variants without also being presented with unrelated entity types.
This is only added since https://ideas.litium.com/ideas/L-I-94 is marked as shipped, but best would be to re-open that to keep the votes.