Fair warning: This is done by an armchair enthusiast with absolutely no practical experience and whose sole experience comes from reading things. I could be totally and completely wrong about many things. Now that that’s out of the way, a look at how a Fuldapocalypse-centric doctrine has skewed perceptions of artillery to the point where Ukraine came as a surprise to many.

To put a long story overly short, the current paradigm in Ukraine is:

• Largely static front
• Lots of drones flying around on both sides (which translates to deadlier air power, which in turn makes it a bigger threat)
• Limited resources

So you can see why smaller, easier to conceal towed guns are liked more.

Now compare this to the Fuldapocalypse:

• Mobile front
• Less threat from air but extremely good counterbattery fire
• Lavish (prewar) spending to afford SPGs.

See the difference?

Now the interesting thing is Caesar-style “truck SPGs”, ie artillery pieces on open wheeled chassis. They have shown the weaknesses of both-ie they’re soft like a towed gun and big like an SPG (and even less maneuverable). However, they’re not really designed for either kind of large-scale war.