The sandwiched Rényi $α$-divergences of two finite-dimensional quantum states play a distinguished role among the many quantum versions of Rényi divergences as the tight quantifiers of the trade-off between the two error probabilities in the strong converse domain of state discrimination. In this paper we show the same for the sandwiched Rényi divergences of two normal states on an injective von Neumann algebra, thereby establishing the operational significance of these quantities. Moreover, we show that in this setting, again similarly to the finite-dimensional case, the sandwiched Rényi divergences coincide with the regularized measured Rényi divergences, another distinctive feature of the former quantities. Our main tool is an approximation theorem (martingale convergence) for the sandwiched Rényi divergences, which may be used for the extension of various further results from the finite-dimensional to the von Neumann algebra setting. We also initiate the study of the sandwiched Rényi divergences of pairs of states on a $C^*$-algebra, and show that the above operational interpretation, as well as the equality to the regularized measured Rényi divergence, holds more generally for pairs of states on a nuclear $C^*$-algebra.