Outside of manually drafting lines (or circles) for reference that's personally what I tend to do, too.
Now I may very well be missing some functionality of the helper lines. As said I certainly wish they would carry more on-screen information (even temporarily), as that would make them immensely more useful and would in turn save quite a bit of drafting time.
There's a custom command making them more permanent, but without distances being shown it's only limited to directions and vertical/horizontal references really.
(By the way, there are a few more features under the little tag that appears when drafting helper lines, but I don't think there is anything about distances in there)