!inputs in Blueprints can be used directly as entities in the HA direct coding, but if you need to template that you need to convert it to a variable and possibly use that variable (text) to re-capture the entity in the actual code. If !inputs could be used in templates, it would greatly simplify Blueprints.
Alternately if a variable in a Blueprint could contain the actual entity as opposed to the text that you get that LOOKS like the entity (but isn’t), this would also work.