Personally I don't think it's so useful of a feature; it saves typing a few asterisks but obscures the fact that you're actually modifying some other variable

Personally I don't think it's so useful of a feature; it saves typing a few asterisks but obscures the fact that you're actually modifying some other variable There are many real-world use cases where references are exactly the right feature, and the const-ness of that reference should make the intentions clear. Performance-critical code is one place where not having the ability to pass large objects around by reference would be a performance killer. References allow us to avoid making unnecessary copies. Yes, you can accomplish the same thing with a pointer, but raw pointers are much less common in modern C++. It's not just syntactic sugar; a reference conveys information. When writing a function you can eschew null pointer checks when using references, whereas a function taking a (raw) pointer should handle the null pointer case since technically you can call foo(nullptr) and it'll compile. With a reference bar must exist for the foo(bar) expression to compile when calling void foo(const Bar& bar), so it's safer, simpler code.