Question

I understand that this “refers” to the current object but it is not the actual object. How exactly does $this refer to the object. Is $this a pointer to the object?

Answer 1

$this is a reference.
From the PHP manual:

References in PHP are a means to access the same variable content by
different names. They are not like C pointers; for instance, you
cannot perform pointer arithmetic using them, they are not actual
memory addresses, and so on. See What References Are Not for more
information. Instead, they are symbol table aliases. Note that in PHP,
variable name and variable content are different, so the same content
can have different names. The closest analogy is with Unix filenames
and files – variable names are directory entries, while variable
content is the file itself. References can be likened to hardlinking
in Unix filesystem.