I don't remember when in my Python career I learned about names vs. values, but it finally clicked for me that I'm predominately just binding a value to a name with the = assignment. Now everything I read has become very easy to reason about and understand.

Ned Batchelder is a good resource for learning many things about python, and this talk he gave at Pycon some years ago is no exception:

https://nedbatchelder.com/text/names1.html