I thought this intro started really clearly, but I did get bogged down a bit matching up the pointers as numbers. So yeah, I think diagrams with arrows would be a lot easier to follow. I remember seeing a talk from Niko with animated box/arrow diagrams that changed as a piece of code executed (alongside a code snippet with the relevant code highlighted). That was super slick, and I thought it really helped make things clear.

Also, is it standard to talk about memory growing "down" as the memory locations numerically increase? That's the opposite of my impulse (I would have said that 0xff is the top of memory, and 0xfe is "down" from there) but TBH it's been a while since I took the relevant CS class.