“swooping to within 7.6 million miles (12.3 million km) of our planet, or about 32 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.”
32 times the average distance between the Earth and the moon is well on its to being closer to the Sun than Earth.
The sun is ~93 million miles from Earth.
It’s less than one tenth that distance.
Your math is off by a lot. The Sun is 93 million miles from earth, this rock will be less than 8 million miles from earth.
It was actually closest to earth on January 8th and is receding now. The Y-Axis is the distance from the earth in AU, "astronomical units", where 1 AU = 92,955,807 miles and represents the average distance between the earth and sun.
Data from: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/app.html#/