I'm going to try an analogy that may be a stretch, and other commenters may follow on and say "wrong, Wrong, WRONG!", but here goes:
If you've ever sloshed water in a bathtub, you know it hits the flat end under the faucet and splashes right back.
The other end usually slants a bit. But what if it really, really slants, like 10 feet or so?
Can you picture the same size wave that would bounce back from the flat end will instead slide way up the slant, and barely come back as a ripple?
It's all about energy transfer. The flat end shows a high impedance to its wave and reflects most of the energy back,
while the slanted end dissipates its wave's energy, in this case turning it into a tiny amount of heat.
When electronic waves reach the end of a wire, cable, whatever, the circuit at the endpoint either accepts their energy efficiently or bounces it back to some degree or another, depending on how well the cable impedance matches the receiver circuit.
Unlike water in a bathtub, this matching is very dependent on frequency - the analogy isn't perfect!