No. Each invocation creates a fresh variable environment. Local variables are not shared between calls. To persist state across calls, use a closure.

The variable environment holds the current call's locals. The scope chain is the chain of outer environment references used to resolve variables not found locally, built lexically at write time.

Yes, in regular (non-arrow) functions. The arguments object is created during the memory phase and holds all passed arguments. Arrow functions do not have their own arguments object.