I was originally responding to the post that said chess had a finite number of moves. That is simply untrue.
Given that your response was comprised of a quote from chess.com and some laughing, I didn't catch that bit of context.
And I find it ridiculous that someone uses an argument but refuses or ignores the implications of applying that argument to their own premise.
Is it not true that once you consider all of the rules, counters, and goals of a game like DOTA that the number of serious or playable moves drops significantly?
That statement is correct. However, even if you prune the permutation tree and remove all of the 'non-playable' moves like running in circles or standing still, the amount remaining in chess is still dwarfed by its equivalent in a real-time game.
Think of it like this- in chess, a move is composed of something like "Pawn from A2 to A3" and can take an indefinite amount of time since the game is turn-based. That's the smallest move you can make, but is immediately meaningful because you've moved 1/8th of the way across the playfield and made your opponent think about the new state of the board.
Contrast that to DOTA where one move is "Pudge from x240/y800 to x242/y796" and always takes 1/60th of a second. That takes you a measly 1/1000th (ish) of the way across the playfield and doesn't change the state of the game in a very meaningful way, but still counts as a 'valid' move if it's part of a larger strategy like 'destroy the tower' or 'kill the other team's off-lane player'.
So where you can execute a step of your strategy in a single move in chess (ex. taking an oppposing piece) doing the equivalent in DOTA (4 seconds walking up to enemy -> 6 seconds hitting them until dead) could take 600, every single one of which could be ever-so-slightly different each time but still valid for the purposes of calculating the game state's total permutation count.
So
TL;DR numerically speaking chess is comparatively simple no matter which way you slice it, but if you ditch the idea of permutation math as per that chess.com quote there's an argument to be made for its strategic complexity where valid moves are defined by player intent instead of individual changes in game state.
You could even say that chess' numerical simplicity forms the core of its deep strategy layer, on account of being simple enough for a player to observe and analyse step-by-step instead of having to react to it as they would with a real time game.