That's true. Chess only teaches two general lessons about strategy: look more than one step ahead, and invent heuristics (abstractions that let you estimate if positions are good or bad) for yourself. Those are useful lessons, but you don't need to play thousands of games to grasp those ideas.
Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy.
Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it.
Other aspects of strategy, like shortening decision loops[1], forming alliances, or the exploration/exploitation tradeoff[3], are simply not represented by chess because it is a turn-based, zero-sum game with perfect information. That makes chess a poor model of real-world strategy.
Still, the things it does teach are real and useful, so as long as you don't think its the end-all, be-all of strategic thinking you can get something out of it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game_theory
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitati...