I've heard it said that we don't know what electricity is or how it works. To what extent or in what sense is that true?
In that sense, we don't know what anything is. But we can still use it. And because everything we learn seems to become useful sooner or later, it doesn't pay to stop asking.
Our current BFF, ChatGPT, says the question is about "charge" in that we don't know why particles have a charge. So what is a "charge" and why? Gravity is also presented as a thing we don't fundamentally (ontologically) know about. Interesting!
And not disagreeing with the desire to keep asking, nor with the desire to find a final answer. The author of the article puts it fairly well:
We don’t have philosophically satisfying insights into the universe at subatomic scales...there’s no straightforward explanation of what a bound electron actually does: it’s not orbiting the nucleus or spinning around its own axis in any conventional sense. Most simply, it just exists as a particular distribution of an electrostatic field in space.
And many unknowns are practically unanswerable.
But don't worry, you won't exhaust the findable.
If we were ever to actually work that out, you can be sure it would all disappear and immediately be replaced with something even more comprehensive.
It wasn't a choice.