Yeah, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the genre and what we have is often a buggy mess - that definitely doesn’t help the adoption of ‘deep strategy’. I love games like what you mentioned but even I get sick of them when I start running into AI or optimization issues, where games devolve into snowballing or boring tedium after the first few hours, when the UI is a frustrating mess that makes me hate every second spent on trying to make it work the way I need it to work.

Or maybe I’m just spoiled by the amount of polish and thought that goes into games like factorio or against the storm.