In the narrow range of poker variants (all heads up, ie only two players, not full ring like all but the last few hands of the Main Event) where it's meaningful to talk about a truly optimal game, any theoretical optimal play will still take money from all humans it's just slower (but with zero risk) compared to exploitative play.

In live cash games, speed matters, you want to take all the available chips before the fish realise they're out-matched, but to protect yourself the optimal play, if you could memorise it, would be safer because it can't be exploited yet it does take the opponent's chips.

Poker players are gamblers. So "safer" isn't really what they were going for anyway.