The whole "tries all possible combinations" thing is a very misleading oversimplification in the first place.

Instead, think of it more like a completely different set of operations than classical computers that, if you were to try and replicate/simulate them using a classical computer, you would have no choice but to try all possible combinations in order to do so. Even that is oversimplifying, but I find it at least doesn't hint at "like computers, but faster", and is as close as making the parallelism pov "correct" as you're going to get.

What these operations do is pretty exotic and doesn't really map onto any straightforward classical computing primitives, which puts a pretty harsh limit of what you can ask them to do. If you are clever enough, you can mix and match them in order to do some useful stuff really quickly, much faster than you ever could with classical computers. But that only goes for the stuff you can make them do in the first place.

That's pretty much the extent I believe someone can "understand" quantum computing without delving into the actual math of it.