However, this contrasts with the Normie perception of the tank, which is an impenetrable bulwark of steel that cannot be stopped.
Yeah, tanks have always been vulnerable to breakdowns, mines, deep trenches, concrete barriers, artillery fire, and infantry disabling their tracks:
In WW2, the Allies and Axis powers lost tens of thousands of tanks, in the Soviet Union's case they lost approximately 75% of all the tanks they had during the war.
Western militaries have kinda gotten the idea, probably from the illusory Gulf War turkey shoot and the perverse incentives built into the Western MIC, that modern MBTs are something like high tech fighter jets. Something you can expect to inflict lopsided losses on the enemy while barely taking a scratch itself.
But in a peer level war, tanks (and high tech fighter jets, and warships, and every other type of fighting machine) are consumables. They're going to be damaged and destroyed by enemy action, so the side that can manufacture and repair more war machines, more quickly than its enemies, will probably win the war.
What the Ukraine war is teaching us is that NATO has gotten its strategy completely wrong and Russia got it right. Small quantities of complex and highly expensive bespoke systems are not enough to win a conventional war with a near-peer enemy. You need huge quantities of good-enough weapons and armor that you can afford to churn out in bulk, and plenty of men to fight in them. The factories back home are equally as important as the men at the front, and having massive stockpiles of weapons and munitions at the outbreak of war is essential if you don't want to quickly run into shortages.
BTW although tanks are now more vulnerable than ever, they're still irreplaceable battlefield assets. The drone menace hasn't made them obsolete, but it does mean every serious military on the planet will be urgently looking at better ways to detect and kill drones. The tanks of WW3 will fight in concert with their own drone swarms, and with good enough AI and autoloaders, they won't need men inside them.
What happens when consumer grade AI is good enough to allow any weapon that has a camera attached to independently identify and attack the enemy, without human input? That means you can set up automated turrets, robotic sniper nests, and finally, the death robots we've always wanted.
