This is exactly what we found in our testing which, admittedly, was much less rigorous/thorough than your own! It seemed to have close to zero impact on the average time to kill. The intention was to reduce the unavoidable bleed that heavies inflicted across the board while still maintaining their strong anti-infantry firepower. They still should and do kill infantry or support weapons when they stick around, but shouldn't be quite as punishing in the first shot out of the fog of war.
There seems to be a placebo effect where people have decided that heavies are bad now and so they see heavies performing badly.
I think what adds to this problem is that people seem to grossly underestimate the huge variation in possible outcomes, especially in Tank vs Inf fights, due to the several layers of RNG in effect here. This, paired with confirmation bias as you pointed out, inevitably leads to wrong conclusions being drawn - which is understandable since especially those very unlucky, highly improbable events tend to stick in mind. KT overshoots four times in a row? Tank is total garbage!
The problem is that, sadly, this kind of preformed opinion is very hard to change, even in light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
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