In both cases you’re heating up food to change it in some form, but cooking changes it in a good way that maintains (or enhances) its flavor and nutritional value, while burning destroys the food.
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“Burning” a food is generally a chemical reaction called pyrolysis, where a complex organic molecule gets broken down into carbon and small volatile molecules like water that evaporate away. It also produces some chemicals that are harmful to you (like polycyclic aromatics) that you’d find in something like oil (in the sense of petroleum, not cooking oil). Since burnt food loses most of its nutritional value because most vitamins and useful organic molecules break down and gains toxic chemicals, it makes sense that it would taste bad to you. (Humans have been cooking food for a very long time, long enough for it to be reflected in our evolution.)
Cooking at a lower temperature, on the other hand, tends to preserve most of the nutritional value while killing bacteria and parasites and often making food softer and more digestible. So it’s reasonable that the chemicals produced in the cooking process tend to taste good.
In short: “burnt” food has gone past the point where your body can usefully process it.
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