Sadly I cannot recommend this game anymore. Even though it is one of a kind game that has huge potential which is not used.
The game economy for F2P player is becoming harsher and harsher to the point that players cannot afford playing vehicles while doing average/good.
The game sees more "top" tier premiums every patch with them being more OP every patch. Especially Russian premiums coincidentally.

The grind.
The grind in this game is okay until rank 4. After that it's immensely slow even WITH premium time AND premium tanks of higher tiers. Grinding out a Rank 7 vehicle takes a lot of excellent matches that you'd have to constantly get. For example I was researching Dardo A rank 6 IFV from Italy. I had half of the RP required for it already which was 135k. The other 135k took me 30 good games ( ie. 6-10 kills per game ) that was with premium time with a talismaned vehicle(Knock-off premium). If that according to Gaijin is good amount of time spent grinding then I don't even want to know how much worse it will get in the future because for the past 2 years they constantly nerfed the SL and RP modifiers for vehicles. They raised repair costs to a point that in ground battles 2-3 kills are not enough to pay for repairs.

The game balance
It is understandable that there are gonna be some differences between vehicles and that's fine but when the vehicles that are dominating the game for over 2 years are performing much MUCH better than they should on top of gimmicky game mechanics that make them survive much more than they should survive it just makes the experience worse, funnily enough those overpreforming vehicles are mainly Russian,

TLDR; Do not play the game in the current state as it got progressively worse over the course of past few years. It's just not worth.

Sadly I cannot recommend this game anymore. Even though it is one of a kind game that has huge potential which is not used. The game economy for F2P player is becoming harsher and harsher to the point that players cannot afford playing vehicles while doing average/good. The game sees more "top" tier premiums every patch with them being more OP every patch. Especially Russian premiums coincidentally. The grind. The grind in this game is okay until rank 4. After that it's immensely slow even WITH premium time AND premium tanks of higher tiers. Grinding out a Rank 7 vehicle takes a lot of excellent matches that you'd have to constantly get. For example I was researching Dardo A rank 6 IFV from Italy. I had half of the RP required for it already which was 135k. The other 135k took me 30 good games ( ie. 6-10 kills per game ) that was with premium time with a talismaned vehicle(Knock-off premium). If that according to Gaijin is good amount of time spent grinding then I don't even want to know how much worse it will get in the future because for the past 2 years they constantly nerfed the SL and RP modifiers for vehicles. They raised repair costs to a point that in ground battles 2-3 kills are not enough to pay for repairs. The game balance It is understandable that there are gonna be some differences between vehicles and that's fine but when the vehicles that are dominating the game for over 2 years are performing much MUCH better than they should on top of gimmicky game mechanics that make them survive much more than they should survive it just makes the experience worse, funnily enough those overpreforming vehicles are mainly Russian, TLDR; Do not play the game in the current state as it got progressively worse over the course of past few years. It's just not worth.