Here is an informal but simple way of thinking about it:

“A reference is a thing (that is to say, a value that you can assign to a variable, etc.) that refers to something else.”

You see, there are plenty of cases where we would like for a piece of data to be in two places at the same time.   Maybe you’d like to send “a massively complicated data structure” from here to there without copying it.   A reference can refer to anything.

Dress it up or dress it down ... it is a very simple concept that really is that simple.   Start from there.