And in some cases, balance goest against immersion. For eg, during World War two, German had by far the best tanks and the best planes, but Allies, numbers. Mainly soviets had an massive amount of troops and vehicles.
I think it's not just that: there's so much exaggeration about particular elements that the picture becomes very distorted, and I think there's a risk that we're replacing The Myth of German Awesomeness regarding their engineering with a new myth of The Soviets Did It All. There's some truth to it, but e.g. where WWII German equipment looks good on paper, it can be less good IRL so looking at their tanks, there's no denying that the guns were excellent and paired with superb optics, the armour was thicker and of better quality and so on. But, they were delivered in a package that was expensive to manufacture, powered by an engine and transmission intended for a vehicle barely half the weight and whose interleaved wheels tended to clog with freezing mud on the Eastern front. Whereas the brutally simple T34 just kept on going and it wasn't simply a numbers thing, though the latter was apparently a pig to drive.
The allied tanks in particular get a bad rap in comparison to The Myth Of German Awesome, with numerous examples. The Sherman being apocryphally nicknamed "the Tommy Cooker" for instance, but does that actually bear scrutiny? The word "Tommy" suggests those in use by the British, which is interesting as those Shermans predominantly had diesel engines fitted rather than much more flammable petrol like the Germans. British designs in general also tended to use electric turret systems rather than the hydraulics of German tanks because hydraulic fluid catches fire; not sure if that was retro-fitted to the Sherman but the 17pdr gun certainly was, and while a slightly smaller calibre than the Kwk.36 it could out-penetrate it thanks to more advanced ammunition designs. Not that I'm claiming most Shermans had 17pdrs, it was an inefficient use of an expensive gun when most of the time their job was to lob high-explosives about, but the technology was definitely there and led to some hilariously unconvincing efforts to disguise the ones that were a serious worry to enemy tanks.
