Honestly a realistic tank game probably wouldn't be very fun. Tanks are controlled by multiple people and fight stuff super-long ranges away these days.
Plus, even when considering older tanks, realism is not necessarily a good thing.
True story - back at the end of world war 2 a single Tiger tank defending the Reichstag at the end of the war successfully held its ground for a single day, which saw the death of around 30 Russian T34s...one Tiger killed them all
(unfounded rumor states that one guy popped his head out afterwards and said "gg, owned").
But how fun would a video game be in which there were vast differences in tank construction, technology, etc?
Simple is better, and balance is better than realism, so yeah BF1942 has one of the better video game tank implementations
.