That really has nothing to do with potatoing shots, I’ve been on the both sides of the argument shooting the BVM perfectly through the carousel and it killing me in return, and me being shot in my carousel and killing the guy in return - this is what a busted damage model is and why BVM is to me a low skill floor vehicle.
A sure-kill shot SHOULD be sending you back to vehicle selection screen, not barely cripple or do nothing to you (yes, this happens to other MBTs too, but BVM is still the biggest offender of the unspoken rule).
Look at it like this, BVM at its introduction was really nothing special - just a T-80U with better thermals and slightly better gun-handling (iirc it didn’t have 40 deg/s elevation at that point in time, in fact i’m 70% positive it and the B3M were runnin around with 30/5 gun handling back then), MBTs were also significantly less survivable back in 2021 (Western ones included), which made BVM overall balanced against its competition.
All this changed soon after; UBH package was added, ERA’s were given shatter mechanics against APFSDS, whereas KEP remained unchanged and still couldn’t (they still can’t) bypass ERA’s like some do in real life, and most importantly, spall generation was lowered across the board.
Now all APFSDS generate less spall than before when penetrating a target, this allowed some Western tanks to go from 1-hit kills to 2-hit kills, sure, that was within expectation given how empty those vehicles are on the inside since modules and structures aren’t really modelled, but what it really did (coupled with already low detonation chances for MBTs across the board) was give vehicles with exposed hull racks a major survivability buff.
Later on Gaijin started to slowly implement spall shields, which lowered the amount of spall even further; see BVM’s spallshield around the carousel for example.
All of this combined into a single huge fuck up which buffed the T-80BVM to insane levels of performance back in late 2021 and early 2022 and gave it its low-skill floor status in my eyes. This wasn’t some “russian bias” type of buff tho, it was an intentional change to game mechanics that simply happened to benefit the BVM the most.