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That's just an addition. Since you mentioned Dota, open the page with the moba games; Smait has 2.5k online, Paladins has 2.8k, and so on. Surprisingly, some unknown Hero's Land has almost 9k. Yes, Dota has 500k, but it and LoL are the only ones in the genre, which says something...
That's exactly what I did: I compared popular strategy games with popular non-strategy games. And strategy games lose in any case. Author
And if you look not at the raw numbers, but simply at profitability (because that's supposedly the point of any business), then there's no problem at all. Rather, your statistics suggest that it should be extremely profitable to make games like The Witcher 3: people are still playing it (and therefore buying it), even though the cost of supporting it at this stage is zero. To get even half of The Witcher's online numbers, strategy games, and even online games, have to constantly maintain servers, release patches, and additional content. But again, this could be a statistical outlier; not all single-player games achieve The Witcher's fame.
That's the point: not all of them do. Any business is a risk of flushing all your money down the toilet. Publishers probably have some statistics with probabilities and will invest more in areas where the risk of losing money is lower and they can at least make some profit. I highly doubt that strategy games are on the list of low-risk, high-profit areas; quite the opposite.