Hi Brad and Gergo,
Thanks for your responses!
@Brad: Yeah, that was also my impression, but I wasn't sure. Seemed strange that the example in the official docs would point to a place where the feature was disabled. Thank you for clearing that up!
@Gergo: I've been looking at action=parse, but as far as I understand it, it is limited to one revision per API request, which makes it quite slow to get a bunch of older revisions from a large number of articles. action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content omits the references from the output (just gives the string "{{reflist}}" after "References"). "mvrefs" sounds very promising, though! I will definitely check that out - thank you!