Again, this maxim has been around since release and there's been NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO buff for it for a couple months if not more. Why is it a problem now?
Because there was a change to OKW, which made Kubel much more potent and volks stronger then cons, sturmpios also got some considerable cost effectiveness buff and OKW got free 100 mp at start more then other armies.
This has led to rapidly diminishing usefulness of cons, relic tried to offset this with vet3 buff, but all it did was to make ppsh upgrade less horrible, stock cons without doctrinal support were still poop in uniform with a slingshot.
Soviet players adapted and switched from underpowered cons(rolled over by volks, rolled over by grens, outscaled and eventually rolled over by osttruppen) to maxims as axis light vehicles arrived too early for T1 to be viable any longer.
Maxims were always strong vs OKW and fine vs ost, but due to volks buffs and okw revamp, soviet mainline inf was no longer a valid choice.
The butterfly effect of CoH2, where because of huge OKW buffs and adapting soviets, now everyone thinks soviets are OP again, which isn't really the case, its cons and penals who are UP in relation to volks and grens
