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I could never understand this concept of “bitcoin mining”

You waste a ton of electricity doing nothing, and then you get a bitcoin?

You’ve produced nothing of any value. You could run in-place for an hour and collect something for that?

You misunderstand the meaning of “value”.
If someone is willing to buy X for $$, X has value $$.
X doesn’t have to physically exist a priori to the sale.
You can go to a car dealership and order a very specific car. The car might not exist. When you place the order you give “value’ to something that doesn’t physically exist yet.

Another “value” example, the “Pet Rock” it was given a proposed “value” by the seller, the buyer by buying it confirmed the seller’s valuation. At that moment it had “value”, before that it was a rock of little to no value.

The Civil War financiers and later Wall Street crooks Gould & Fisk were reported to have said something to the effect, “People will buy anything all you have to do is find the right person to ask!”

You’ve produced nothing of any value.

You are keeping decentralized books on BitCoins in the form of blockchain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

BiotCoin main not last, but blockchain is a technology that is going to revolutionize accounting and contracts.

Your computer is participating in a huge distributed database, and what it is actually doing is recording, verifying, and encrypting transactions. These go through a consensus process and are written to the database - there is no master copy, and so part of what your computer is doing is also participating in the consensus process and "voting" which of the copies of the blockchain will assume master status and overwrite the rest. This is very computation intensive, and your reward for the electricity and hardware investment you've made is a bit of the overall action.

The problem is that the reward is seldom more than the cost, and tends to go to the resources which are most computation-capable, hence most expensive, and that always increases as technology improves. If the resources are subsidized by the state, it's really the state transferring money to the operator indirectly. If you have to pay for your own cycles, you'll go broke, but if you can get somebody else to, you're in business.