UCH, that damn beacon. It became immmmmmmersion-breaking, the number of times I'd either 1). See the beacon sitting there, and then make a PLAYER decision (me, not my toon): DON'T TOUCH IT! ... only because I know it'll be stuck in inventory forever if we don't do the quest. And how many times can you do those sort of quests?
2). Pick it up without thinking. Which means the only way to get rid of it is reload a save if we don't follow the quest. And how many times we we do those sort of quests? Again, breaks the "I" word.
I was writing a Laprima quest a couple days ago, and wanted to make an ingredient into a Quest Item. Was surprised I couldn't do it with a simple toggle. There wasn't a toggle to make the ingredient Quest Item! Same goes with potions. No toggle. Although at least there are Food Item and Potion toggles for both sorts of items. This means we can't accidentally consume them if these toggles are off.
But yeah, Beth often uses Aliases to assign quest status to items, which are tricky to understand. I haven't mastered how Aliases work, yet.