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Suppose we have a LaTeX counter, which we’ve defined with \newcounter{foo}. We can increment the value of the counter by \addtocounter{foo}{1}, but that’s pretty clunky for an operation that happens so often … so there’s a command \stepcounter{foo} that does this special case of increasing-by-one.

There’s an internal LaTeX variable, the “current label”, that remembers the last ‘labellable’ thing that LaTeX has processed. You could (if you were to insist) set that value by the relevant TeX command (having taken the necessary precautions to ensure that the internal command worked) — but it’s not necessary. If, instead of either of the stepping methods above, you say \refstepcounter{foo}, the internal variable is set to the new value, and (until something else comes along), \label will refer to the counter.