I disagree strongly with part of this. I think there can indeed be "actual strategy" from the players' side. Even though the fictional situation the PCs are engaging with will not have the same level of detail as the real world, the plans the PCs come up with to deal with the situation are still an exercise of real strategic thinking on the part of the players. This is no different than participants in a war game being able to develop actual strategies.Well, just that CaW must then be a TYPE OF FICTION. I think I've already elaborated on that point in a bunch of posts up thread. There are no ACTUAL strategies being employed, just the RP of strategizing. It may be that part of that is an assessment of the fictional quality of the strategizing RP vis-a-vis what has already been established about the scenario, and the GM's (maybe also the player's) general feeling about that (IE plausibility). So, in character the plans they come up with may look a lot like being strategic or tactical, but in the real world you also consider every possibility, at least inherently. The process in the game, for the players, is more like "what is it actually likely this GM will be willing to spring on us that he hasn't told us about yet?"
Sure, unlike most war games the evaluation of the players' strategies in an RPG is mediated through a DM, which introduces subjectivity to the action resolution. Even a DM who successfully masters their own biases simply doesn't have enough detail available regarding the state of the game world to make a completely objective ruling on how the players' strategies play out. (Although some DMs go to a great deal of effort with advance prep to be able to be as objective as possible.) But the inability of the resolution system to be completely objective doesn't necessarily mean the players were just play-acting like their PCs are making plans--the players' planning can still be actual strategizing.
I take your point about the incentive for the players to strategize regarding what plans they can sell to the DM, rather than strategizing strictly in relation to the fictional scenario at hand. But that's not a given--just as a DM can try to ignore their own biases, players can choose to try to ignore the incentive to play the DM rather than playing the fictional scenario. It won't be perfect, but I don't think that's sufficient to dismiss the players' ideas for dealing with the fiction as just "RP[ing] strategizing". The players' strategic choices for what actions to take to address the fictional scenario are real choices--its not inevitably just an IC planning montage.
(And even if the players aren't completely successful at engaging only with the fictional scenario, real world social engineering of the DM is very much amenable to actual strategy, just of a very different sort! )