They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties
The "bomber mafia" (they didn't call themselves this) were prewar strategists who thought you could destroy an enemy's ability to fight by hitting his strategic and tactical assets with bombers.
Basically they thought that bombers would be to the next war what artillery was in WWI.
What ended up happening is level bombing wasn't very precise, it was often hard to identify the correct targets, and modern mechanized war machines were more resilient than expected so bombers ended up not being as decisive as expected.
"Area bombing" or "carpet bombing" and the strategy to "dehouse and demoralize the population" were tactics developed during the war when the earlier tactics weren't working.
>Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m)[1]
This means that 50% of bombs fell within 1,200 feet of the target, which is an absolutely awful accuracy if you're trying to hit anything specific.
This was further compounded during the campaign against Japan by the heavy reliance of Japanese wartime industry on cottage industries which were dispersed almost randomly within Japanese population centers, rather than being located within specialized industrial districts. From a purely strategic standpoint which is only concerned with destroying the enemy's ability to make war, the most effect way to disrupt these kinds of industry with 1945 technology was essentially to burn every building in the city to the ground. Other options were simply ineffective.
In WW2 you were lucky if you managed to hit a city-sized target, never mind an industrial site.
I do hope wherever you are from that your cities are larger than a few hundred yards.
Even then, I don't think it would be correct to say that the Americans had no other capabilities for targeted attacks. With air superiority you can do strafing at relatively low risk, which is very accurate. And the USA had also developed rockets by this point, which could drastically improve accuracy when compared to unpropelled bombs. They even used these operationally against Japan before the atomic bomb attacks.
The RAF tended to carpet bomb at night, but the USAF wanted to precision bomb by day.
It was nowhere near as precise as today's tech but it vastly improved during the course of the war.
Ultimately it didn't work because the theory didn't work. German manufacturing was not disrupted by precision bombing enough to matter
Masters of the air also touches on this, and some of the disastrous missteps during the raids that led to aircraft loss
Level bombing with dumb bombs was never going to be particularly precise regardless the sophistication of the bombsite because bombs in free fall don't have the momentum of an artillery shell so their trajectory is less dependable.
The norden also had a multitude of parameters that the bombardier had to input quickly and accurately as they were changing during a bombing run under flak barrage.
That being said the real problem with the air war in Germany was target selection. If you want to know more I'd suggest the book The Collapse of the German War Economy
https://uncpress.org/9780807858509/the-collapse-of-the-germa...
During the bombing of Dresden bombs somehow gravitated towards the city center 2km in diameter, while factories and railway hubs on the outskirts weren't damaged at all.
The core of the critique remains on substantive issues.