I recall reading that WW2 aircraft fired rockets were far less effective than thought at the time, but there was a fair bit more success with "large" calibre aircraft mounted guns, especially on the German Stukas vs Soviet armour?
37mm was adequate against the top and rear armor of WW2 tanks. Hell, against lighter tanks, 20mm could do damage. Tanks have gotten a lot heavier since then.
Even they were vastly over-reported in effectiveness. True, on a good angle you would get a penetration - but it's sort of iffy on most safe attack angles. You'd have to come down at quite a steep angle to guarantee a penetration.
And after you had that... then what? 37mm is not going to necessarily destroy a tank. You can injure/incapacitate/kill crew members if you hit them, and cause damage to some components if you hit them, but that really doesn't mean the tank was "destroyed".
If you go by the after-action reports of any air force, and sum up the number of tanks destroyed you end up with a number that is higher than the number of tanks in service at the area, at that time... by some significant margin. A lot of the time, pilots would fire their guns at a tank, see some effect of the fire (tank stops, smoke comes out, crew abandons tank, etc.) and report it as "tank destroyed".
In reality, what often happened was the tank was hit by aircraft fire, the pilot saw some effect of the fire, and reported the tank destroyed. In many cases the tanks deployed smoke and stopped after being hit by air attacks, waited until the attack was over, fixed the damage (if any) and continued on their way.
In some cases the tank was truly immobilized by air-to-ground damage, or crewmembers were injured. In such a case they might choose to dismount the tank if the threat level outside was acceptable compared to waiting to be hit more in a steel box filled with fuel and ammunition.
Regardless in most cases the repair crew would fix up the tank and it would be back in action fairly soon.
This "stat buffing" is present in the after-action reports of
all air forces, mind you. The reports of the armoured units themselves tell a different story entirely.
Also, I don't know if the tangent needs to be split. It's still peripherally related to the topic at hand, I would say. In MekTek, it seems like this won't apply in the same way due to the way how salvage works - forcing a crew into abandoning a tank would definitely count as a kill.