That's silly, you don't know what you're talking about.
Looks at physical copies of original C&C, all three Red Alerts, Civ4, Warcraft, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, and a steam library with Mindustry, Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Captain of Industry, Desynced
RA2/YR is/are my gold standard(s) for any rts games, i always find myself going back and playing them whether it be solo campaign, skirmish, or logging into CnCNet and doing some online matches.
I don't know what it was about RA1/2/YR but the units just felt right? When you got to 3 they all just felt off, and im not sure why. It wasn't a balancing issue, but interestingly I got the same thing moving from stronghold 1 to two - they almost lost their physical presence if it makes sense???
Everything felt too "multi-purpose" units did follow the rock-paper-scissors balance, but tanks being able to go waterborne boats being able to go airborne broke any proper counter strategy it was always a game of cat and mouse and whomever could micro unit abilities the hardest instead of balance and strategize(or zerg rush lol) but that's just my take.