UX improvement: use autocomplete for entity selection in area handlers

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Thanks!

There has been no solution to this problem. It's a UX improvement in a somewhat obscure feature of core that I imagine is relatively rarely used. But the current feature still has the same problem as clearly described in the issue summary. If you want to attach a rendered entity to a Views area (header, footer, etc), you have to manually type in the entity ID. See attached screenshot. This is not intuitive. An autocomplete would be better.

Seems I have to reroll my patch 😁

This seems to be much more complicated as I thought initially. Simply changing this input to an (entity) autocomplete wan't work because the field also accepts tokens and twig syntax.
I tried conditionally to disable the autocomplete validation but that doesn't work. If you enter a token or twig markup EntityAutocomplete::matchEntityByTitle() fails with error There are no @entity_type_plural matching "%value". because strict checking is always TRUE for autocomplete fields that do not have the autocreate option set to TRUE.

A possible way to solve this would be a custom autocomplete handler based on EntityAutocomplete that overrides ::matchEntityByTitle() (simply returning NULL) but that seems not to be the best solution.

Any thoughts about this?