“I’ve read countless articles on Bitcoin and mining, and I still have no understanding on what it is or how it is mined.”
Bitcoin generates a target hash consisting of alpha-numeric characters which a numeric value.
Generating hashes is easy but generating the hash you want is hard.
Miners must use the header of the block chain to solve for a hash less than the target hash. This is done buy interatively changine an allowed character. When they do and if they are the first, they have mined a Bitcoin.
buy interatively >> by iteratively