I started reading “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and I came across an use case for change management. The author introduces an example on page x. He then starts a new section and discusses a new thought. One the next page (x+1) he refers back to the example (on page x) with the lines “as shown above”. I found that distracting, since the example was on the previous page and I had to interrupt my reading to make sense of this line.
I am guessing, the author had a different format when writing the book. There, the example most likely was on the right page and his reference made absolute sense. But depending on the format we choose for printing/ displaying a document, references need to be adapted. In consequence, change management is also useful for automatically updating references inside of documents. Although, I guess, these do not need to be propagated and, therefore, are not that exiting :0)
By the way, I would really like that feature when writing papers: I often leave out the caption of figures to save room. Hence I must use references such as “to the left” and need to update these references whenever I rearrange a picture.