If your only goal is winning and being liked, then I would agree with your statement. But thats taking a skill into isolation, and completely ignoring the wider applications of that skill.
I would hope that people employ the skill of being liked and “winning” to help further ethical goals, and help persuade people that unpopular ethical acts are actually important and valuable, thus increasing wider support for such acts.
Ignoring those wider opportunities would be like saying that programming is a waste of time, because you’re only teaching a computer to do stuff, you’re not solving problems for actual people. This argument, of course, ignores the fact that you can use programming to teach computers to solve problems for real people. And indeed thats the primary reason most people program.