I remember surprisingly little of most book fight scenes: I find them quite tricky to write well, as well. There's a lot of pitfalls: you don't just want to make it a he swung a sword/he swung a sword boredom-fest, but making the twists and turns
too great can feel like melodrama, and putting in actually interesting bits of combat can be tricky without the reader having a technical explainer available on what a certain thing actually looks like.
'Area control' and 'aggro' mechanics are good examples of the way games can create abstract but entertaining combat. They don't correspond to anything specific in real combat but they are entertaining (and work around issues like the long turns in D&D, versus the fraction of a second it takes to whack someone running past).
Area control I think arguably does model the fraction of a second it takes to whack someone running past: at least that's sort of how I've always read those mechanics, as being about the presence of mind needed to strike someone who's getting into your space but isn't focused on you - and conversely that if you know someone's that good you might not take the risk to run past them. That said, it generally doesn't model that if that person is already engaged in fighting you can probably barge past their other side, and that theory of fighting doesn't necessarily square well with models that use hitpoints etc.
Aggro/taunt mechanics always seemed much weirder to me, you sort of need them in a tank and glass cannon style party combat system to avoid enemies doing the smart thing and taking out your glass cannon and ignoring the tank, but they're weirder than area control because a) it just feels odd that these tough tank guys have some random ability to yell things that make trained professionals, beasts from the void, or literal bears want to attack them and also b) this is
almost always a one sided mechanic, unlike area control it's extremely rare to find enemies with a taunt/aggro mechanic for the reason psyanojim gave earlier - losing control of your characters sucks and players hate it.