You can play with https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ to see what happens.
In short: without a passphrase, the 12/24 words are entropy and get hashed into your private key. With a passphrase, this is added to the entropy, creating a completely separate wallet.
The difference between the two is that the bip39 encoding (the 12/24 words) have a checksum built in, so if you make a mistake, it most likely will catch that. You can try this by changing one of the seed words if you generate a random seed.
The passphrase does not have a checksum, so any typo will create a completely new wallet.
Not the best explanation, but mainly a shill for Ian's great tool.
thanks to all
The winner was also the quickest answer: https://primal.net/e/note18j33h6tn0svywze0nmlgqdldltemcvwjjwcpzf97ytmkvsnltw4qhtmwlx
bc through that tool he posted I immediately understood the mechanism behind it. It also showed me how any mnemonic words are a representation. Great simple tool: https://iancoleman.io/bip39/
Other great answers here thanks everyone & until next bounty !
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