If a zval container were referenced by other containers and you changed the referenced zval, you would automatically change the contents of the other containers referencing this zval (because they'd simply point to the changed value and thus change their own value as well).
zend_get_parameters_ex() doesn't care about this situation, but simply returns a pointer to the desired zval containers, whether they consist of references or not. Its corresponding function in the traditional API, zend_get_parameters(), immediately checks for referenced values. If it finds a reference, it creates a new, isolated zval container; copies the referenced data into this newly allocated space; and then returns a pointer to the new, isolated value.