Yeah, unfortunately. Basically, there were two changes that made them absolutely useless.

First, they nerfed harries to hell and back by removing the option to repair them from the third seat. Lots of people liked it (of course), but suddenly MBTs didn’t have any real threats anymore. You could still score a kill every now and then with a lightning by sneaking up on them from behind with the “shotgun”, but nerfing harries effectively nerfed lightnings a ton, too.

Secondly, they decided to add a new allrounder secondary gun for vehicles, which was a bit too powerful, imho. Because with one or two of those, even a goddamn sunderer was more powerful than a frigging lightning. At that point, there was essentially no reason to pull them. Well, I guess some people still used them for 18th century-style fights with two columns of vehicles shooting at one another until one side collapsed, but who cares…