This might not be as silly as it sounds. I'm not talking about penetration dropoff. Getting through hard ceramics and metals is a bit different to flesh. Currently, a lot of rounds are even worse than they were before (eg. 7N1) due to damage dropoff starting near-immediately from the barrel. This means it can't even 1-tap a naked chest past about 10m. I don't know about you, but fucking 54r struggling to kill an unarmoured target with a torso shot sounds… very goofy to me. Most rounds are useless for even 100-200m headshots now. Not because they can't penetrate the helmet, but simply because… it doesn't do enough damage? Somehow? I'm pretty sure a supersonic piece of tungsten entering your skull at around 1km/s is going to kill you consistently. Even from a pure gameplay perspective, this contributes to the semi-auto .308 dominant meta we've seen this wipe. On top of the recoil changes, it really makes it not worth running anything else unless you're fighting people on Factory or Labs where range is short enough that you're not running into this issue.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EscapefromTarkov/comments/v9qrfr/should_damage_dropoff_even_be_in_the_game/