The phrase "a key reference point" is correct and usable in written English
You can use it when discussing something that serves as an important basis for understanding or decision-making.
Example: "In our analysis, we identified a key reference point that helped us evaluate the effectiveness of the new strategy."
Alternatives: "a crucial benchmark" or "an essential guidepost."
For both teams, a gap of 19 years was a key reference point.
They duly did, in what may prove a key reference point for this clash.
Rather, it has become a key reference point in understanding political change throughout the world.
The Beach Boys became a key reference point for bands, most of them celebrating youth.
It makes sense that struggle is a key reference point for the video, because Cash suffered his own troubles during the 1980s.
The clanging synth chords of Our Love and Bowls are designed to prompt nostalgia for rave's halcyon era – Orbital is a key reference point – in the same way that the War on Drugs evoke warm memories of 80s rock radio.
According to The Black Book of Communism, a disreputable key reference point for the right, almost a hundred million humans perished at the hands of self-described "communist" regimes, mostly victims of Mao Zedong's regime in China.
This protest is carried out by the classes who, in days gone by, were once the key reference point for a political and intellectual world that has forgotten them.
Regarding the massive sustainability challenge mankind is currently facing, there is an indisputable need to implement sustainability as the key reference point into higher engineering education in order to prepare the stakeholders of tomorrow.
Pinsky's key reference point for the game is not Dante but a poem of his own: "The Figured Wheel," a fragment of which appears in the accompanying "Mindwheel" book (though Pinsky's name, which appears in the poem, is replaced by Dr. Virgil's).
His mother Francisca, who occasionally appeared in his films before her death in 1999, was his key reference point.
