The weirdest thing is that it was not included in the 30 games competing for the Players’ Voice award.
This tells me the following:
The jury was not competent enough to understand the relevance of MSFS, so they didn’t consider it between the top-30 titles of the year overall, which is simply silly.
It won best strategy/sim because strategy games are just as obscure among mainstream journalists (which are the biggest part of the jury). I can’t imagine those being able to understand the intricacies games like Crusader Kings 3, so ultimately the “I can see my home!” effect still prevailed, at least among those competent enough to copy and paste google maps coordinates into the search of the sim. 
I think the award is entirely deserved, of course, but likely it was given from the wrong reasons. I’m ready to bet literally no one in the jury is competent enough with flight simulators to complete an entire flight from take off to landing even in a Cessna outside of the extremely scripted tutorials holding their hand.