Arty playing experience, what’s going on here

I am not an arty player. I have about 30k games over the past 10 years, less than 1k of which are in arty. And most of those were in the early early days when I unlocked soviet arty from the KV and ground up a few tiers out of curiosity. I've used this arty for all the SPG missions in the T28/T55A/260 campaign and it worked fine. Big gun for damage missions, small gun for stun missions.

Anyway, I've recently unlocked the M55 so I can do alliance arty missions for the Chimera/279e and I have like a 20 percent winrate in it so far. When I played arty back in the day I did decently and had something like a 51 percent winrate.

But now when I play I have I have trouble contributing to outcomes. In a normal tank, I'd go out and fight the enemy and affect the outcome of the match. You are in charge of getting vision on enemies and damaging them. You see enemy tanks, you shoot them once every 5-10 seconds for 300-500 damage.

In arty, I struggle to deal damage. Waiting half a minute and then dinging someone for 200 damage is very weak and that's actually a best case scenario. Most of the time it's a struggle to get shots on people and even when you have shots, unless it's a direct hit on a lightly armored tank, the impact will be very weak.

What am I doing wrong? Is arty just bad to play now? If arty is just bad, why is my wn8 so low? Someone is obviously performing well in it.