For TSR-era editions of D&D, yes, tactics are vitally important as you’re all but guaranteed to get a pile of dead characters without them. Tactics are less and less important as WotC editions roll by. The game’s balance and design allow for PCs to blindly charge into combat, so they do.
Is this really a pattern? It was 3e and 3.5e (due to full attacks, and the lack of inter-character synergy), and IMO it's true of 5e, but not 4e. 4e required teamwork, support, careful use of your resources. I have plenty of first-hand experience, much to my chagrin, with "once we got coordinated, and tactical,
we started winning."
Separately, I'd argue TSR D&D wasn't "tactical." It was logistical--what is usually called
strategic, not
tactical. It leaned into the word "campaign"; each combat was a
battle, one step in the whole
war. WotC D&D is far more tight-focused. This has been a trend in D&D since before there was "D&D." D&D grew out of wargaming: "hit points" once measured how many "hits" a
squad could take before being no longer fighting fit, but Chainmail turned it into a single person's ability to continue fighting. Early D&D retained that wargame ethos/conceit, hence the "FFV" epithet. But D&D has steadily done more and more of that "from an individual, low-level perspective" shift over time. In jumps and starts, to be sure, but it's a clear trend across the decades.
Old-school D&D was strategic. Note, for example, your own description here: speaking negatively about being allowed "...to blindly charge into combat." That's VERY much a strategic/logistical judgment, annoyed by a game that doesn't have strategic consequences for (claimed) unnecessary combats. Meanwhile, new-school D&D is
can be tactical...but it often isn't. Because tactics aren't rewarded, ruthless
personal optimization is rewarded.
I find a significant portion of the problems with D&D can be traced back to the fact that many DMs do not realize how the official rules and their personal house-rules/rulings/tweaks
create perverse incentives. 3e/3.5e was CHOCK-FULL of perverse incentives that dragged the game away from its intended goal--which is the bigger reason why I say 3e/3.5e is a "badly designed game," beyond the implementation issues (which are a matter of
balance, not whether the
design is good.) A well-designed game makes it so the
effective play choices are also (a) the
fun play choices, and (b) the experience
intended by the designer. Both 3e and 5e have some very big problems with rewarding players who do things that
are not the intended design experience.