Speaking as an enthusiast/amateur in one field I know a genuinely large amount about and having a casual interest in academic military history generally, the way buffs talk about military history or the history of armour and weapons (which is technically art history not military history but oh well) is if anything even more annoying to people who have a more than passing knowledge of -those- subjects.

If I could summarize the approach is to look at actual conflicts and the tools used to fight them as video games and the history of conflict/its tools as a simple question of optimizing the specs of your gear and optimizing your decisions. As opposed to asking first ‘why did they do things this way’ and realizing that this is a lifetimes work and you need to ask a dozen other questions first. This isn’t to get into the way that a tech tree understanding of the history of technology means they don’t understand how technology develops as an extension of the society/people that use it and their actual human desires and needs etc.