I feel like there's a possibility that the War Thunder forums are a vehicle for plausible deniability of spying for another country. They pay you to post something on the War Thunder forum at a specific time, if you get caught you play dumb. Would be pointlessly roundabout though.
The Jack Teixeira case shows that there's a bunch of classified shit that's accessible to swaths of 'analysts', half of which probably are playing War Thunder.
I'm only playing it because at the moment my VR experience with DCS is subpar and I'll surprise myself with a better GPU come this November. Plus the F14B kinda plays nice in WT.