How popular is damage modulation cheats?

i was playing a RoN game and in 2019, i got maneuver warfare tanks with nearly maxed stats for defense and attack reasearch. I got in a war, 600 of my troops with flank buff, vs 10k of his MOVING static lines troops. My tanks got instantly killed, then he took my 2m pop capital with 135 TROOPS in around 3 seconds. Sounds a bit like a rant, but i dont normally call people out for cheats.