C's declarations are supposed to reflect the usage of the thing being declared. Pointers have the indirection operator in front of them, because a "typical" use of the pointer uses the indirection operator. Functions are followed by parentheses because that's how functions are called, and arrays are followed by the subscript operator because that's how array elements are accessed.
While it's really not a big deal where you put the star, the caveat that @Duthomhas mentions starts to seem natural and even the most complicated declarators immediately become readable if you keep this in mind.
Were he still alive, I expect that Ritchie would put the star next to the variable name.
Threads are regularly mis-titled regarding questions asked and content therein.
Indeed, and when that happens, it's helpful to explain things to the OP, to help them understand things better.
If the OP here thinks that what they've used in their post is a dereference operator, then it is helpful for them to understand why it isn't, because that leads to a better understanding of how the * sumbol is used in different contexts.
But perhaps the question doesn’t have anything to do with the name of the thing.
If I could re-title people’s posts, I’d name it
Do spaces around the asterisk matter in pointer variable declarations?
I would not title it:
Confusion about pointer declarator and whitespace (And how this is not a question about the pointer indirection operator.)
That would be meaningless to every non-language-lawyer on the planet, and you shouldn’t have to be a language lawyer to use the stupid asterisk. (And anyone who could ask such a question doesn’t need to ask it.)