>Especially at lower levels, chess is a game of short term patterns, not long term strategy. That’s actually wrong. Short-term patterns will improve your chess short-term but you’ll hit the plateau pretty fast. They don’t teach you to play better at chess. It’s like copypasting some code from the Internet without fully understanding how it works. In chess, it’s absolutely necessary to have a long-term plan: especiall…
I've tried learning strategies rather than tactics, but it's significantly harder both to learn and to use. I've learned a lot about imbalances for example, but all of this knowledge goes out of the window whenever I start playing.
You actually shouldn't learn any strategies. They're usually too difficult and very often don't make any sense.
There are two possible long-term plans: giving the checkmate and gaining more resources if you feel like you don't have enough to give the checkmate. In the majority of your middlegames (depending on your level) your plan should be attacking the king.
Attack the king and align your moves with this plan. That's the only strategy you should have. Don't overcomplicate chess. Then you should play as much as possible and get feedback. Most of the time you get it when you make a mistake and your opponent punishes you. This way you can slowly, game by game, build the next layer of your chess understanding.