So game and metagame are important here.
Overall, I agree with your point. This is the reason I don't play those games, or in those ultra-competitive brackets.
I don't think we're necessarily contradicting eachother. I choose to play fighting games for the fight, rather than the victory, and thus tailor my choices within that genre to suit me.
To offer a couple of 'parallel' examples to your own:
Player A is at a significantly higher level than player B, and 'stifles' player B through consistent reads and conditioning. Nothing player B tries works, everything player B does seems to play exactly into player As hands.
This is almost a restatement of your example, except it was a highly rewarding experience for me. In the language of cognitive psychology, it brought about a powerful flow state.
The two key differences: 1.) that the skill imbalance was not too great - just great enough - and 2.) that the nature of the game's design and the players' choices in tactics/playstyles ommitted the more obnoxious elements of combat.
My second parallel example is simply my first, reversed: I am player A, and my opponent is player B.
Everything plays out the same. Interesting, that.
Because implicit in player A's skill is that they are in control of the fight - they can, usually, make things fairly unpleasant and dirty for the opponent. It doesn't take much to push someone past the mental edge, to knock them off balance and keep them there; to destroy their flow state.
Why is player A so restrained? He didn't want to win, he wanted to fight.
Players motivations in games are often what makes the difference between a positive and a negative experience. So we nicely return to the beginning: if you're focused on winning, you're not going to have a good time and neither are the people playing with you.