Difficulty accessing unpublished references in Sanity.io

Based on your question, it looks like you're dealing with _strengthenOnPublish which is a property Sanity adds to references that are created in draft mode. When you try to dereference these with ->, you can't access the referenced document because it's treating it as a regular reference that expects a published document.

The issue is that _strengthenOnPublish indicates the reference will be "strengthened" (converted to a strong reference) when the document is published, but while it's in draft mode, it behaves differently than a standard reference.

Here are a few approaches to work around this:

1. Use a subquery instead of the dereference operator

Instead of using -> to dereference, you can manually fetch the referenced document using a subquery:

*[_id == 'drafts.11a505c1-2e8c-4276-af96-9e05535f77c3' || _id == "11a505c1-2e8c-4276-af96-9e05535f77c3"] {
  slug,
  "resolvedModules": modules[_ref == "a118f6b8-1126-4e9b-96de-e4fb4d28be00"] {
    _ref,
    "document": *[_id == ^._ref || _id == "drafts." + ^._ref][0]
  }
}

2. Convert to weak references

If you're creating these references programmatically or through mutations, consider using weak references. Weak references are specifically designed to handle draft documents and don't have the same dereferencing limitations:

{
  _type: 'reference',
  _ref: 'document-id',
  _weak: true
}

3. Query both draft and published versions

You can explicitly check for both draft and published versions of the referenced document:

*[_id == 'drafts.11a505c1-2e8c-4276-af96-9e05535f77c3' || _id == "11a505c1-2e8c-4276-af96-9e05535f77c3"] {
  slug,
  "resolvedModules": modules[_ref == "a118f6b8-1126-4e9b-96de-e4fb4d28be00"] {
    _ref,
    "document": *[_id == "drafts." + ^._ref || _id == ^._ref][0] {
      // your fields here
    }
  }
}

The key insight is that _strengthenOnPublish references can't be dereferenced with -> in the traditional way while in draft mode. You need to either use weak references from the start (if you control the reference creation) or manually resolve the references using subqueries that account for both draft and published document IDs.