Max level (9) player of Ground Forces here, Normal WT player since 2015, 25 days since I first installed it, 2 extreme grinding days with 4 days of free premium accounts:
Good stuff:

• The optimization, I'm amazed it works at all on my shitty phone (Poco M3) though at 30 fps minimum settings and with fps drops to 20 when there's smoke and worse fucking falling trees on sight (when they aren't down they are 2D textures but if they get taken down they become full 3D with more polygons than the tanks and really reduces fps)
• Gameplay is good, the aiming is exactly the same with drop and aim indicator, you have adjustable zoom from no zoom to max zoom and at max the camera will actually zoom as much as the enemy tank size no matter the distance also you have optional tracking that will perfectly follow an enemy tank moving and all the tanks have this same sight, the driving is as you would expect (the driver seems less stupid even, at least on reverse gears) with an optional visual arrows to help you know where the tank is gonna go, you have death cams, enemy hit cams, you have all the shells that are available on WT (though you can only have 2 types), machine guns work too etc
• Free smoke even when stock
• Free arty no matter what type of tank you have
• No repair cost on vehicles when you die, or shell cost, no more losing SL bs by playing
• Some war thunder premiums are tech tree here like T14, Black prince, M26E1
• You can get 10 GE by watching ads every 2 hours, with 100-130ge you can get 5 squad levels (it gives you a whole tank without grinding) or with 100ge a day of premium which gives 1.5 times rp and SL
• Stock tank crew gets 1 fpe and 1 repair per tank spawn instead of 0 and 0 like in normal WT, you can get up to 4 fpe and 6 repair per tank
• No crew lock if you leave, you can leave uptiers if you want
• This game has bots when there aren't enough players (happens a lot in tier 5) and it makes grinding easy
• The daily login reward bonus IS ACTUALLY GOOD, the normal one gives you either 15k sl or 1 backup, the big rewards gave me 150GE or 1 day of premium (worth 100ge), the best part is that if you watch an ad you can get the daily reward again so thanks to this I actually got 2 days of premium, if you watch enough ads you can get premium platoon tanks (eg 47 ads for T-34E, T-34 1st gvtbr, kv-2 1940, or 57 for Dicker max, Panzer 3 M, and panzer IV J or 377 for KV-220 which I'm gonna get since I'm never gonna get it on normal WT, already at 1400GE of ads)
• When grinding you don't need to stick to a nation, what you can buy is limited by the player level so instead of researching a specific tank with the same nation here you just play whatever you like
• You can get perfect (ace) war thunder crews without GE and pretty easily by just playing the platoon, when you reach level 25 on the platoon you have it (I already have it on my Tiger 2H/JagdtigePanther F crew)
• Currently they are giving some free platoons/tanks (0 sl cost) when you level up, usually it is the less fun choice (br*tish or fr*nch) but pretty nice still since it's free you can select it and then buy with sl the fun tank platoon (tiger h1)
• When you level up they give you 50 GE, a bunch of backups (37 iirc) and consumables
• Less annoying map objects, barely any fences
• Downtiers are really fun with a good heavy tank, eg you can face with a tier 4 Tiger 2P or T26E5 jumbo pershing these tier 3 Tigers H1,hetzer, vk 3002m, T-34-85, IS-1, SU-152, M4A1 76, M6A1, ebr 1951, arl-44, m4a1 fl10, comet, challenger, churchill VII
• You can either buy normal (with sl) or premium (ge without spending any sl) version of any tank platoon you want, so not just a talisman that only increases rp and not sl afaik

The Bad Stuff

• Let's get the thing most people are concerned over with:
• The parts and fpe consumables, currently you can watch every 2 hours an ad to get 20 parts uses and 20 fpes (currently at 3256 parts and 3345 fpe, I'm stocking up just in case lol), luckily I've found out that you don't really use that many repairs or fpe per game, it's pretty rare that you will use more than 2 repairs and 1 fpe per game since the games are pretty short usually and if you die you won't use any repair or fps, currently most tanks use only 1 consumable per repair but in tier V the american platoon does use 2 consumable per repaifpe use, in the future gaijin could increase these even more to make high tier unplayable by making a repair 5 consumables for example, you can also buy these consumables with silver lions, 100 parts or fpe cost 15k sl which is about 15 kill game on premium account normal platoon tiger 2H but for now I haven't bought a single one, only ads
• SL gain is currently bad, luckily it's mostly only used to buy tanks and you can (and should) skip the worse tanks in favor of getting/saving up for the best tanks, currently a 15 kill win game with tiger 2H gives you with premium 15k sl or 10-11k sl without premium, every 2 hours you can watch an ad to get 3k sl btw
• The rewards are heavily based on the amount of kills and wherever you win or not, you barely get anything with assists, there's no scouting option either so light tanks kind of suck, you don't get more stuff the longer the match is like in normal war thunder so the quicker it ends with high kill count the better
• The maps and how few of them, oh god they are all city super flat maps like abandoned factory, an edited poland (there aren't these 2 long hall ways where you see the enemy entering the town anymore, it's blocked by the church) and edited stalingrad which again is super flat, as a american tank hulldown enjoyer these maps barely have any spots to hide your hull and hull down so I had to go mainly germany and some soviet
• Spawn points,here you have 3 spawns instead of 2 on normal gamemode of 3 caps, the problem is that these spawns are very close to the cap points, the enemy can be back to the cap really quickly and some of the spawns are so awful that you can literally see them spawn from the cap point
• Some up tiers can suck and you can have up to 1.3 br spread : so this game has completely ditched the BR system for a Tier System, how does this work? well basically two adjacent tiers can face each other so 1 can face 2, 2 can face either 1 or 3, 3 can face 2 or 4 etc luckily the platoon are 3 selected by gaijin vehicles so you can't just have 3 same br tanks, usually there's a higher br tank and 2 worse brs one, like for example 5.3 tiger h1, 5.0 vk3002m and 4.7 hetzer, or 7.0 tiger 2h, 7.3 jagdtiger and 6.3 panther F, 5.3 M4A3 76, 6.0 m41, 6.7 T26E5 etc
• If you leave the game early it will count as an lost match even if you win so if you used all your 3 respawns you can't leave the game if you want the full reward so you will have to spectate, if you know your team is gonna lose you can leave early
• If all that remain are bots it's a pain because you have to wait for the enemy to kill them
• Some level 0 platoons are really unplayable because:
• Stock shell grinding is still here (imagine tiger h1 with 110mm pen HEAT shell as stock until platoon level 3 or T-34s with solid shot, YEAH that was a thing, luckily they removed it)
• How unlocking tanks in the platoon works, at platoon level 0 you have 1 tank, if it's a good tank you are good, but if it's a bad tank you are fucked for a while until you reach level 5 and unlock the second tank and level 10 for the third and level 15 for the usually antiair, with one tank leaving early really sucks, when you get the second and then third tank you will notice a sudden extreme level of getting xp for the crew all the sudden
• Some level 0 platoons having only 1 shitty tank (Tier 4 M4A3 76 stock with solid shit, and then T26E5 on level 10 platoon is prime example) to play and having the good tanks on the platoon/crew level 5 or 10 (this is how you unlock the tanks on all the platoons) the problem of this is that you can only respawn once unless you use backups and if you leave the game early it will count as a lost game so in games you perform well with your shitty tank you will have to wait for the game to end (if your team is clearly winning if it's losing you can leave) luckily you can skip both these prior points by watching 10-13 ads by getting 5 levels with the GE you got from the ads
• Antiair is unplayable against planes afaik
• You can't free look without turning the turret which is annoying with both fast turrets (showing an enemy your side turret eg tiger 2H) and slow turrets (moving the turret into an undesirable position eg Panther D)
• Currently missing all the war thunder ways to check the armour and shells on the hangar or test drives, currently I wouldn't recommend this to anyone that doesn't have war thunder already because of this
• Updates are a pain, you have to keep redownloading the apk from the wtmobile page every time and install it
• Currently everytime you open it you get an ad of GE of some premium platoon which is annoying

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Ok, that's all I could think I've been writing for more that 2 hours bruh, btw if your phone is good unlike mine you might be able to connect to your pc and play with basically pc mouse controls thanks to tc games, it makes grinding way more bearable but I've gotten pretty decent with touch controls and I'm max level so I won't need it anymore: https://www.reddit.com/Warthundecomments/13u6cn8/8_kill_game_in_war_thunder_mobile_with_mouse_aim/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/WarthunderPlayerUnion/comments/13wsm8j/can_i_have_my_3000_dollars_and_3000_hours_back/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Context: War Thunder is a vehicle based combat-MMO from 2013. Vehicles in game are planes, tanks, and ships ranging from the early 1920s to the 1990s. The game is ostensibly free to play, but at higher tiers especially it becomes very difficult to play the game without a premium subscription (which earns you 50% more money per match) or a premium vehicle. Without premium, you're basically guaranteed to lose Silver Lions when you die at higher tiers.
Gajin, the developer, is notorious for implementing mechanics that increase the grind/are not player friendly (for example: when first playing a new tank, you have to research and buy a fire extinguisher. If your tank catches fire before this, you're shit out of luck, and you'll have to wait until your tank burns down and your crew dies).
Now the playerbase, and /WarThunder in particular, has a reputation for being fairly toxic and for hating the game while continuing to play. The reason given being that no other game hits that sweet spot of historical combined arms combat.
When Gajin announced the newest changes to the economy, a portion of the playerbase finally had enough and raised an outcry, as described in this SRD post.
After this the /warthunder sub was dominated for days by players review bombing the game on Steam and Google, changing the game's overall reception to 'mixed'.
Gajin eventually removed Steam from their listed platforms, but as far as I know the game is still playable through Steam.
Ten days ago, Gajin announced that they were reverting the latest economy change. They also invited players to take part in a survey about the in-game economy (with predictable results) Later they followed this up with a blog post, apologizing for the state of the economy, and promisied a road map with changes to be published next month (The aplogy blog post has since been deleted from the website).This was received with suspicion on /WarThunder: redditors either believed this was a move by Gajin to stop the review bombing, or were convinced this proved they were not aware of the state of their own game because they do not test it properly.
While all this was going on, some players formed the subreddit /WarThunderPlayerUnion. A sub dedicated to organizing a boycott of the game, starting on the 26th of may. Anticipation rose to a fever pitch, posts on both subs reminding people not to play (although there seemed to be some confusion about how long the boycott was suposed to last: a day, or several weeks).
The 26th rolled around and... nothing happened. The player count basically stayed just as high as usual.
Meanwhile union members (mostly centered on Discord) immediately spotted one of the organizers still playing the game.
The player count led to several conspiracy theories about Gajin artificially inflating the player numbers. Other posts on the player union sub even accused Gajin of remotely taking control of their PC, and logging into the game.
Union organizers started getting pretty slap-happy with the banhammers on people pointing out that they still logged into the game. Infighting between conspiracy theorists and moderates happened, and this all led to several dramatic 'I'm resigning as a union admin'-posts.
The /Warthunder sub seems to be mostly back to normal now. Normal of course being complaining about the state of game, posting about anime body pillows, with the occasional post exhorting players to not give Gajin money.
EDIT: added some missing links.

It's kinda sad and funny at the same time that the boycott completely failed. Did people seriously think that Warthunder community is so large? It has 370k members, out of those half probably don't even play the game anymore or don't use reddit anymore, so we are left with 180k people, and even if all 180k stopped playing (not gonna happen), that's still only 180k people, while war thunders playerbase is millions of people. People just forgot that reddit is pretty niche and 90% of active players don't go to the subreddit. And than because of the echo chamber that formed, people were expecting that the whole playerbase would stop playing. Like what?

If yes, it should happen only when we are 100% sure that it's a sock puppet and not someone with different opinions.
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I've brought up sockpuppets several times and people act like it's tinfoil hat hocus pocus. It isn't conspiracy theory tier stuff: it's a modern marketing tactic, and hopefully by explaining how sockpuppets work, I can demystify them and you'll be on the lookout for these kinds of accounts in threads. This way if there's a wave of backlash and negativity over something totally reasonable, you won't mistake it for 100% genuine and fall into despair.

What is a sockpuppet?

A sockpuppet is an account that exists to be used in a social media PR campaign. Sometimes they're created on the spot and have no history. Other times they have a very scant history of thin but innocuous content unrelated to the topic at hand. Rarely, it is a carefully curated account meant to look real, and those are tough to distinguish from real users.
A large number of sockpuppets will be used by a small number of people posting from multiple accounts. Sometimes these people are in a "war room" setting, coordinating to identify multiple threads to operate in, while maintaining enough separation that no two sockpuppets appear in the same place, so that the overriding strategy proceeds undetected.
The key to identifying most sockpuppets is a lack of their own posts, a comparatively large number of comments vs posts, a very narrow set of topics of interest (2 comments on football, 30 comments on warthunder), or a recent account age.

Sockpuppet Thread Tactics

Sockpuppets are deployed to a thread to manufacture false "diversity" of opinions, and to shift the narrative forcibly towards what their employer wants.
They generate a starting statement, something that obliquely attacks people, in this case, for wanting a better economy, without proposing any ideas of their own or asking anything of Gaijin.
The sock puppet relies on bystanders, people who want to be seen as savvy, to hop on board so that the sockpuppet can reply and generate rapport, creating a feedback loop.

Example

We're in a thread. OP suggests that the boycott is justified because of historical pricing vs 2023 pricing. Maybe they include a screenshot of their earnings from a match in 2019. They encourage people to join the boycott.
Sockpuppet: "God you losers are so cringe, did you really think the boycott would work? Your discord is a mess it was doomed to fail."
Bystander who might agree that the economy is fucked but is on the fence about a boycott, or just wants to be a bully, or just wants clout replies: "Yeah all they do is post cringe communist memes. They don't understand the game lmao addicts."
Again, the goal is to redirect the narrative and change what is considered a "normal" opinion. So above, instead of "Gaijin releases one too many egregious pay to win economic nerfs and players upset and boycotting" it morphs into "players too stupid to successfully boycott, also they're cringe."
Blame is successfully shifted to the dissatisfied customer by making it seem like the other, uncomplaining players, better understand the game. Importantly, the conversation breaks down in such a way that evidence and principles take more energy to defend, while ridicule is very easy to sling around.

So what?

Sockpuppets are just one part of a very standard social media PR blitz kit in the year of 2023 and it's been the status quo for the last decade.
They exist to demoralize and shift the conversation away from their client's weaknesses. The danger to the sockpuppet is that once identified, you have a very clear picture of the topics your opponent doesn't want discussed, and their current level of desperation.
The difficulty is that when calling out a sockpuppet, you call out everyone who somewhat agrees with them, even tangentially. The sockpuppet will gaslight you and call you crazy or cringe, because you'll sound like a lunatic blaming social media spec ops for what appears to be the opinion of 3 normies, when it's really 1 sockpuppet riling up 2 useful idiots.
So don't necessarily engage. If you do, engage in a way which deprives them of oxygen and denies them the chance to bait you into discussion which they'll undermine. Simply downvote the sockpuppet, call them a shill, and don't reply further.
Or take note of the account and try to recognize the tactics beneath the comments. Analyze their post history. Why are they in this thread? What are they encouraging? What are they discouraging?
Happy hunting!