Looking at media generally, the vast majority of spellcasters fall into three categories:
1) Those who don't fight much at all, whether with magic, ranged or melee, and tend to win through non-combat cleverness or tricks (which may involve magic) or running away (sometimes magic-assisted running away). Ged/Sparrowhawk or Merlin or the like.
2) Those who use magic constantly and heavily in combat and often outside it too, and where it's their primary or sole means of doing combat (including using magical items). You mentioned Dr Strange, and the vast majority of comic-book spellcasters fall into this category, Harry Potter basically does (I mean, he's between 1 & 2 arguably, but he usually falls back to magic), most videogame characters who are "wizards" or anything remotely similar (as opposed to "clerics" or "paladins" or "spellblades") also work like this. D&D spellcasters have been in this mould since 4E and arguably leaned that way since earlier.
3) Those who are also powerful combatants (usually in melee) outside of spellcasting. D&D is not great at modeling these people, though 4E and 5E are better than previous editions, and 1E/2E could sort of do it via multiclassing (3.XE was just terrible aside from the Gestalt stuff). Other games are often pretty great at it (Shadowrun, for example). Indeed it's notable that the demand for such characters to be supported mechanically has been huge for most of D&D's history, from the Elf of BD&D to the explosion of classes and PrCs which tried to be this in 3.XE. The huge number of attempts also show that the actual results are typically disappointing. There's been an unhealthy fixation on making this an "Elf thing" in D&D's attempts though (4E dumped the "elf thing" and 5E resurrected it, but at least offered a lot of other options). These are also fairly common in media, and rarely elves.