I don’t think you must use state. I don’t have the full context of your document and use case, but normally for this, I expect that you can use metadata to place data into specific locations in the document, and you can use query to receive that metadata and create a list/table/result that uses both the data and the locations of the metadata as needed.
It’s quite common that problems are solvable using either state or query. It’s often easier to work with query than state, at least in my opinion. Also IMO, storing the result of here() in state is a sign that query would be better.