Some things are too big to store on the stack and you need them in the heap. Those two words may be gibberish right now but it gives you a new thing to learn.

My advice is to learn pure C and make a few small programs with it. You'll see very soon why pointers are necessary.

Something else that people haven't touched on yet is dynamic memory allocation. Whenever you create a new object you'll need a reference to it. That reference is a pointer.

It doesn’t “forward to”, it is a way to say “ehi, this data X is located at …”

Imagine having a big large data structure that takes up a lot of space. You have to pass it a function to perform some operations, but if pointers didn’t exist you would have to clone those data - which is expensive memory wise and probably time wise to. So instead of wasting either space or time, you simply pass a memory address to that data and using it you can access the original data.

Obviously if you have primitive data structures, such as integers, or that you know that aren’t expensive to clone, you can simply pass by value and call it a day (somewhere on learncpp theee is a very nice explanation of all of this)