It just incurred to me that Knime already has a quite similar feature … the Call Workflow Service respectively Container Input (Table) node
About refactoring, I submitted a few feature requests some time ago to improve upon that by:
Or, during 5.3 Community Hacking Days, to improve the virtual port type of the report connection.
Refactoring is always a pain and becomes exponentially difficult when components wrapped in components are used. Though, I can currently not envision an improvement except what @takbb pointed out to use a component that not all connections got severed resulting in a situation where you ask yourself “where was that port connected to”.