The general consensus is 1-5 for strength, 8-12 for hypertrophy, and anything above for indurance. But why?
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Lifting weights, and more generally any kind of exercise, stresses your body. Your body responds to this stress by trying to get better at dealing with that particular sort of stress.
Lifting heavy weights with low reps makes you adapt to lift heavy weights with low reps better. Some of this will be muscular hypertrophy, since more muscle cross-sectional area = more force produced, but a significant portion of it will be improvements in motor neurone function. You’ll also just get better at the skill of lifting heavy weights, which is the primary way weightlifters (and sports scientists) measure strength.
Lifting light weights for high reps makes you adapt to lift light weight for high reps better. IIRC this is mostly to do with how much glycogen (fuel) your muscles can store, and how efficiently they can use it and move it around. But the light weights mean that the muscle fibres aren’t producing enough force to break themselves down, so there’s not much adaptation in size or neurone function. The body pretty much goes ‘cool, looks like these are working pretty well for whatever it is we’re doing 👍’
Lifting moderately heavy weights for 8-15 reps is pretty similar to lifting heavy weights for 1-5 reps, but the lighter weights means that it’s less taxing on the whole body and you can do more total volume. Volume of reps done above a certain percentage of your 1RM seems to be the biggest driver of muscle growth, and sets of 8-15 seems to be the sweet spot to get the most useful volume in.
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