I know this is usually given as an explanation. However, it doesn't make sense to me.
This is because you're not sufficiently educated to be discussing this issue.
If the tank breaks down regularly at certain interval, then you must make sure you'll have good transportation capabilities.
Why? This is
certainly not how the Germans handled the fact the Panther couldn't handle a 100km drive without its final drives spontaneously combusting. (Their solution was usually to grin and bear it, and when that failed, destroy the vehicle in place.) It's in no way matched to American experience on the matter, which was based around battalion-level refits for knocked-out tanks that saw most of them back in action in less then a week.
What are you arguing for here? Full factory refit? That's crazy talk. There are levels of maintenance you perform on a tank, of course. Field maintenance is easier than depot is easier than factory, but the fact that the Soviets designed the T-34 to require depot-level maintenance around the point it would normally be knocked out is hardly going to require "good transportation capabilities"; you simply drag it to the battalion or regimental maintenance group with another tank. There is actually very little you can do to a WW2-era tank, even in terms of combat damage, that demands a factory-level refit.
This wasn't the case for USSR on the Eastern Front (or anywhere in USSR to be frank, and actually, it still is not), and the dysfunctional T-34s were very close to cost the USSR the war as the planned replacements could not arrive fast enough on the front lines.
Even in the most fever-dream sources from the German side, this would be regarded as base insanity and I cannot fathom how or why you would arrive at this novel...
theory. The T-34's planned replacement T-43 was not only ready to go in late 1942, it was
deliberately rejected in favor of the more limited T-34/85 upgrade to keep production numbers up. Base T-34/76 was superior in every meaningful combat sense to existent German tank designs until Tiger, and Tiger was never numerous enough to be a useful weapon. Even when deliberately massed during engagements like Kursk, the Russians more or less wrote the book on how to deal with Tigers via defense in depth and interlocking fields of fire with AT guns. In Russia, the newspaper reporting the blunting of the German offensive with the headline "The Tigers Are Burning!" is famous.
If you're arguing in a more tactical scope, then there's nothing to support you at all and this argument becomes even more incomprehensible.
And then the replacements broke on the front line without contributing to the push forward. It seems to me that the T-34 held some kind of tactical advantage over its temporary rivals, but almost caused a strategical disaster.
Again, crazy talk. There's nothing like this in any existent source of the period, even the breathlessly pro-German ones. I just pointed that out with the Operation Barbarossa site, that it made claims, and did not back them.
The much more logical reason for the tank breaking down is actually poor material quality, poor production standards and uncaring assembly and production personnel - I do not believe the tank was designed to break that way, but instead the strategy had to be modified (and rewritten) to take this into account.
Unfortunately, design documentation is available and disagrees with this. Besides, if you honestly believe that any of this is necessarily an impediment to a long-lasting machine, the T-55 was notorious for dumping nearly a kilogram of metal shavings into its oil sump as the engine knocked off the unfinished bits during the first hundred hours of operation. You just filter them out and keep going, no biggie.
Realistically, the T-34 isn't even breaking down in a meaningful way in this discussion. Every 90 hours of operational life, it requires depot-level preventive maintenance to adjust the transmission. That's what's happening here. The only reason this is true is due to the awkward positioning of the transmission. It was entirely possible to have moved the transmission if it was necessary. It was not.
I reserve the right for the possibility that I may be wrong. However, my first question when these statements are abound is to ask "factually incorrect according to whom?". Western sources that rely on Russian sources?
So you're going to literally make **** up instead? Rely on the Germans sources, which were pretty much obvious feel-good nonsense when compared to their combat reports?
I mean, there were things wrong with the T-34 design. It was ergonomically one of the worse tanks of the war. The original two-man turret crew was not good, compounded by front-opening hatches that blocked the view forward. Some units literally issued the driver a sledgehammer because that was the force it took to change the gears. They were not originally equipped with radios enough (though when it became obvious that a radio for every vehicle was a necessity, the Soviets spared no expense to make it happen). Their tactical application was frequently lacking. But the problems you're arguing for are simply ridiculous, born of ignorance about the platform, about what is actually being discussed when we talk about mean-time-to-failure here.