>>106566931
Think of the sampling frequency is the resolution of the audio.
Lossy compression methods throw out data from the audio data in a way that it's less noticeable.
The bitrate (kbps) is the size of the file (well, the average size of 1 second chunks of it).
You can have a 1080p image of a black screen which you can compress to a few bytes losslessly with PNG. You can also have a 1 hour empty audio stream you can compress to a few bytes with FLAC, so the bitrate would be very low.
VBR is just a method of varying the bitrate in each chunk because for some parts you can throw out more information and it would still sound fine.