I'm having difficulties understanding the swapping of variables. There are many helpful threads explaining how to actually do it, but I am having difficulties understanding it. The example I'm talking about is:
var a = 1;
b = 2;
c = a;
a = b;
b = c;
In my (very basic) understanding I read that in plain english as: the variable c per declaration holds whatever the variable a is pointing at. Since we assign a = b after the declaration, shouldn't the next assignment make b hold the value 2 (because c is pointing at a which we just assigned to b)?
JavaScript is call/assign by value (more specifically, call/assign by sharing) I.e. when you assign a variable to another variable, the value of the variable is copied. Assigning a new value to a variable never changes the value of another variable. There is no implicit link between them.
A bit more visual: Assuming that b holds the value v, then after a = b, we have
b -> v
a -> v
You seem to think that we have a -> b -> v instead, which is not the case.
In your example:
c = a; // c now holds the value 1
a = b; // a now holds the value 2
b = c; // b now holds the value 1