Many many games follow the same moves(1 move = 2 plies) for a long time, up to 30 moves in some cases, 20 moves is downright common and 10 moves is more common than not.

These series of moves are referred to as opening theory and are described at copious length in tons of books.

This is because while the raw number of possible paths to take is immense, the number of reasonable paths for 2 players of a given strength gets smaller and smaller.

If I went over the 300 or so classical tournament games I've played I would ballmark that maybe just one or two would deviate from all known theory in the first 10 moves.

So the criticism is valid in my view. The existence of copious chess literature can't simply be ignored here.