How come members of this sub are obsessed with operational military history?

One thing I am desperately trying to understand is this sub's (and many other people in general) obsession with what is called operational military history. That is, the study of the detailed minutia of battles.

An obsession with operational military history—memorizing troop movements, battle orders, and tactical minutiae—is a foolish distortion of what history truly demands us to understand. It reduces vast social and political cataclysms, ahem, like the Civil War, to the maneuvers of a few generals, as though Lee’s flanking or Grant’s supply lines capture the war’s essence.

Individual battles are essentially ternary: a side either wins, loses, or in essence, ties. All other information about these battles seems to be window dressing and ignorable.

I feel like a lot of people will think they've learned about a war because they have tons of operational military history memorized (cough cough Shelby Foote) and yet they have an elementary surface level understanding of the central causes or structural forces of the war.

In other words, operational military history displaces understanding of the war itself. Thoughts?