Where does things get allocated with pvPortMalloc()?

It simply means that in xTaskCreate the memory required for the task stack is allocated taken from FreeRTOS heap as documented and if configured i.e. configSUPPORT_DYNAMIC_ALLOCATION is enabled.
Besides looking up the well documented FreeRTOS sources there is a lot of good documentation e.g. FreeRTOS Kernel Developer Docs recommended to read.
See the chapters Static Vs Dynamic Memory Allocation and Memory Management there.