That answer is garbage. A backing bean can be a POJO, not some sort of JSF-specific object with JSF-specific properties (such as UIComponent). In fact, backing beans, generally
should be POJOs, at least as much as possible. This whole nonsense about using binding is, as far as I can tell, leftover stale documentation and mythologies from when
JSF was still being designed and no one had a better way. Binding is not needed very often these days.
When you declare a bean in faces-config.xml (or as a ManagedBean annotation), you are declaring to JSF that you want JSF to manage an instance of this Bean, and part of the faces-config description of that bean is the name that the bean will be managed under. Same thing with the ManagedBean annotation, although the annotation can assume a default name based on the bean's classname if you don't provide an explicit name.
A backing bean is simply a bean that's referenced from a JSF View. Technically, you could construct all your backing beans the hard way in
servlets and store them in Session or Application attributes (Request scope is harder to do that way). But it's easier to make the backing beans be Managed Beans so that JSF does the job for you.