Handle mySql POINT fields in Laravel

Hi!

in my project I have a model User, which uses a POINT data type field. However, MySQL store this data as [GEOMETRY - 25 B], which Eloquent sees as a Binary data, therefore I am unable to echo it in a readable way. I have found the following solution, which works:

namespace App;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    // snippet
   
    protected $geometry = ['latlong'];

    protected $geometryAsText = true;

    public function newQuery($excludeDeleted = true)
    {
        if (!empty($this->geometry) && $this->geometryAsText === true)
        {
            $raw = '';
            foreach ($this->geometry as $column)
            {
                $raw .= 'AsText(`' . $this->table . '`.`' . $column . '`) as `' . $column . '`, ';
            }
            $raw = substr($raw, 0, -2);
            return parent::newQuery($excludeDeleted)->addSelect('*', DB::raw($raw));
        }

        return parent::newQuery($excludeDeleted);
    }
}

If I understand correctly, this code convert into a text the relevant field each time I make a query (e.g.: 'POINT(37.774929 -122.419415)'). However, I am not able to understand what's actually going on, I tried to read the documentation to no avail. In particular, what does Model::newQuery do? Why we need a $geometryAsText attribute, which seems to me be alway true?

Thank you.