In my experience, it's rare to see int& in day to day as a regular old lvalue... it essentially just allows you to alias a variable to another name. It's much more common to see them used in function parameters to leverage pass by reference. In C++ pointers usually aren't particularly useful compared to just passing things by reference since stack variables get auto-gc'd it's the preferred style of frameworks like Qt and is extremely easy to use.

Here's a breakdown if you want more information https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/reference

never mind, I looked it up. It’s a “reference” instead of a pointer. Similar, but unlike a pointer it doesn’t create a distinct variable in memory of its own.

I'm almost sure it does create a distinct variable in memory. Internally it's still a pointer, specifically a const pointer (not to be confused with a pointer to a const value; it's the address that does not change). Think about it as a pointer that is only ever dereferenced and never used as a pointer. So yes, like the other commenter said, like an alias.