Confused on a basic operation of regular expressions

Question

I have a rather basic question about regexes.
I use the expression .* without thinking about it match expecting to match e.g. up to the end of the line. This works.
But for some reason I started thinking about this expression. Checking Wikipedia (my emphasis)

.  Matches any single character  
*  Matches the **preceding** element zero or more times  

So now according to this definition, why doesn't .* try to match the first character in the string 0 or more times but instead tries to apply the match to each character in the string?
I mean if I have abc it should try to match a,aa,aaa etc right?
But it does not:

 ~
$ perl -e '  
> my $var="abcdefg";  
> $var =~ /(.*)/;   
> print "$1\n";'   
abcdefg   

Answer 1

Confusion starts with the word "element" in Matches the **preceding** element zero or more times. Term "preceding element" here refers to "preceding pattern" rather than to "preceding capture" (or "preceding match").

Answer 2

This:

.{2,4}

is really shorthand for this:

(..)|(...)|(....)

In the same way, this:

.*

is really shorthand for this:

()|(.)|(..)|(...)| // etc.