Are chess strategy books useless for beginners?

Controversial opinion I know but imo someone who is starting out should just do tactics and train his visualization and ability to look ahead till he is like 2200 or something. I think learning strategy can seriously hinder a player's progress till he actually becomes good to use those strategies.

Any thoughts on this? i think chess strategy books are harmful for beginners since they tend to sway their time away from tactics and visualization exercises.

tactics and endgames are more useful than strategy

The books need to be tailored to the students' needs. In the beginning, tactics (i.e. capturing hanging pieces and not blubbering your own ones) are certainly most important. But then you need to know how to create tactics/combinations, which is by improving your pieces, attacking weaknesses, using open files and so on. So strategy and tactics go hand in hand, you cannot really separate them from one another, although tactics will win you most of the games.

I know its slightly off topic, but my first chess book was Openings of Ruy Lopez ;-D 45 years ago, and I am still rubish lol

For a true beginner anything more than basic strategy is probably useless, yeah.

That's silly.

Name a single person who has done this.

its true that strategy is useless if you can't see any tactic few moves ahead...
but 2200 is really very late for starting learn strategy... at least if you mean 2200 otb... i think that you should start with studying strategy somehow more seriously in something like 1500 otb rating...
also depnds on time control more time = more strategy because you have enough time to calculate and avoid any tactical trap...

I guess it is going to depend on how the book was written and how much application you put into it.

If it is a book that starts at a positions and then has annotations and variations, and you work through those examples systematically - start from the diagram and then make the moves in your mind, then after a few attempts use a real board if you need to, visualising what the position is about and the candidate moves - even if the central conceit of the book is beyond you, the working through the positions will probably be a useful exercise.

Not that I am an expert, but I don't think any book of games, annotated by a master can be a waste, if you are walking through the positions, and not just reading it as a novel.

Building intuition is one of the most important things to do in chess. That and calculation and endgame technique.