I think it also depends a bit on how you define a skirmish game. You can do a skirmish battle between powerful vehicles (just look at X-Wing. 4 – 6 ships in total is a skirmish in my book, or Tanks) or a skirmish with small units and light vehicles (Star Wars Legion 500 point skirmish mode, nobody in their right mind would field a pointsink like a tank) and skirmish on a “hero” level. Like frostgrave: one or two powerful characters and some canon fodder folk.

So if you play skirmish on platoon size like FoW a monster of a unit is bad for the overall playability. But then it can be very restrictive for the one fielding it. You need to pay the point costs, you only have so much unit on the table with that monster and the enemy can run circles around you. Depending of what the scenario you play, big tanks will not help much. (Example: in Legion you need soldiers on foot (aka troopers) to secure objectives, you can’t do that with a tank or walker.) If FoW has similar restrictions that tank is less and less useless.

In my experience plunking a big point sink monster on the table is never a guaranteed win. At best it’s distraction. It comes down to balancing. Yes, that thing can kill your troop with one hit but it has no turret so it needs to turn and in the whole theatre of WW II there where only X units produced so you can only field a maximum of Y. (Advantage historical games here because we know the rough numbers of actual fighting vehicles and can adjust the game with the help of rules. “at no time more then X vehicles of type Y on the same battlefield”.

What needed to change was the “lust for the new shiny”. And that will never do. Simply because we gamers want the new shiny and companies need it to stay floating.