Sorry, for some odd reason the OP never allows me add photos. I dont know if I'm not seeing it or if it's a technical issue on my side

thank you floral. that makes sense. What do you think of the idea of dividing them but nursing them very carefully until they establish a stronger root system separately before planting them out in the garden?

If I leave them there, wont they compete with each other for resources the same way vegetables will if you dont "thin" them?

Strawberries grow as a single plant in a multi stemmed rosette and are perennial. To spread themselves they grow runners which seek new soil. Most vegetables are annual or biennial. The thinning out it is to remove excess plants from a crowd, not to split an individual plant into pieces. That’s not what you’d be doing with strawberries. They wouldn’t be competing ‘with each other’ because they’re all one plant. You’d be weakening it and increasing the time before you obtained fruit. Imagine you had two rabbits in a hutch. You could remove one rabbit and give it a hutch of its own so it has more space. But if you had one rabbit you would not increase its chances by cutting it in half.

Thank you again.

I have heard that some strawberries do not put out many runners. In the case of these, do you suggest dividing but only if I can tell theres plenty of root system?

The only strawberries I know of which don’t put out runners are alpines. But I’m not a strawberry expert. I don’t really understand your desire to chop these plants up. It will not help them at all. If the pieces survive they’ll just take longer to produce than if you left them alone. It’s hard to see from the picture but they appear to be very young plants in very small modules. In which case they need to planted out in their final home and allowed to get some growing done before you start fiddling with them. So no, I do not suggest dividing. And they won’t grow runners until they are strong and settled.

Can you say where you are located? That has a bearing on what they should be doing at this time of year. Also pictures of the whole plants with a sense of scale would help.

The bigger more robust the plant is the more it will produce, so it's counterproductive to separate them. As mentioned, when they start setting runners, those are your new plants, sever them from the mother plant after they have tap roots set. If they are not where you want them to be, gently dig them up and replant them. 99% of any runners I have transplanted, have survived, just fine.