the "real life lore" is called physics and this game is based on them, what you are saying here is that broken physics are fine because it takes micro to abuse them properly (because even from start the game itself wasnt designed for battleships to be able to shoot at underwater units, this just proves the brokenness of this mechanic further as there isnt even a control to tell your units to do something like this and you have to work around to get it to happen by using groundfire), unlike artillery hitting air units (which even has some sense sometimes unlike this), this takes a lot less skill to do
yes it works balance wise, but thats like fixing a hole in a ship by blowing another hole on opposite side, its not a ship anymore and sinks faster, the solution like I said is to stop fooling yourself into thinking this is balanced and instead fix the broken mechanic first and then nerf underwater units so they are balanced without it, currently they arent OP because of a broken mechanic, without which they would be OP and then you nerf them, and then you get a balanced game without using nonsensical mechanics like this to seesaw the broken units
I guess its once again up to whether the "micro pros" on balance team can stand their skills in fighting the controls be turned obsolete by fixing the controls instead, something which seems to stall this game for a while now