Strafing is not an exploit, it's a core mechanic of CS. Playing "normally" is playing wrong. I should note I've spent most of my time in Gold in CS so I'm also not great at it LOL.

Every video game played at the highest levels tends to have this kind of weird execution barrier. Coming from CS mechanics to my current favorite of Planetside 2, I had to learn that movement meta wasn't so important, burst and range was. The automatic guns reset their bloom in durations of just a few frames, so if you are doing it right it doesn't actually look like you let go of the trigger, which is absolutely baffling if you are used to CS burst/tap and spread patterns. And all the guns are projectile based with unrealistically slow bullets which adds some unintuitive target leading and situational preferences based on whether you need faster bullets and sprint-to-ADS times or slow but powerful at range.

And when you get to learning those parts of the game, you always end up sitting down and drilling a small part of the technique for hours over the course of a few sessions, because that's the only way to get the right muscle memory.

It's unavoidable wherever games are doing abstract things: mouse/stick/button inputs are meaningful because of the context, not because they are the actual action being performed.

When I want a game that feels fully connected, I play pinball. Virtual games get close(and work great on a phone) but real ones let you nudge the machine finely.

My strategy comes mostly from the 1.6 era, and you are right that at the time it was mostly a matter of stopping to move, crouch and headshot.

I guess you can learn how to anticipate the deviation as long as it's static and dependent on your movement speed (e.g. not random), but that's still good right? It's a skill thing, not a luck one.

stopping and crouching make sense, however the mechanic is exploited in a way that doesn't make sense.

you basically move forward and if you see something you want to shoot, you move backward for a fraction of a second. that will cancel the forward acceleration vector much faster.

also another strategy is to find a place covered by a wall, and move left/right quickly. when moving from left to right, there will be a point when the acceleration vector is 0, and that is the moment to shoot.

That’s essentially what games are. They are man-made programs with their own rules and “exploits”/quirks that one has to master to the fullest if they want to be competitively good. For a while (I don’t play it anymore) I was a top 1%-ranked online player in PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) and once a fellow player laughed at the stupidity of comparing a game in PES to an actual soccer match, which I had to agree with.