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I decided to make another addition to this, but it's really almost a new class of mech as opposed to a selling point for existing designs. And unlike many of the other realistic mech use cases that we've talked about so far, this requires a mech that can actually walk and isn't a half-tank, half-mech design like many of these >>1106. A small and light quadruped design where the upper body is just a head would work for this; the AT-AA from the Star Wars expanded universe is a good example. Lore-wise the first version of the AT-AA couldn't attack ground targets at all, but later versions of it fixed this problem; we're going to assume the latter.
So far the main combat use for a realistic light mech is against drones and infantry, with a secondary anti-tank function achieved by planting I-beam barricades in the ground in strategic spots. You can also build a heavy tank-class mech to fight tanks, but you're going to pay more for it. But what if there was another way to beat tanks, one that the Reddit-tier tanktard midwits didn't even think about because they're too busy jacking themselves off about how a tank would just blast right through a mech, according to them?
I'm talking about a mech built specifically to raid logistics. The idea is that a mech can defeat a tank not through direct battle, but by sabotaging the supply lines needed for the tank to function. A small squad of light mech units could go around an enemy tank company over terrain that conventional vehicles can't go through to hit fuel tankers, ammo dumps and basically anything else that functions in a support capacity.
This is the mech functioning similarly to light cavalry units of the ancient world, where the tanks are the heavy armored cavalry. Light cavalry didn't try to fight heavy cavalry, but they could go around the vanguard of an opposing army to harass their food supplies. No equivalent of this combat archetype has ever been seen on a modern battlefield, because no modern ground vehicle has ever had the comprehensive terrain traversal capabilities of a mech. I think it could be even more impactful here because even if a medieval army got their food supplies interdicted, the possibility that they could live off the land existed depending on where they were. But unlike food, tank shells and diesel fuel don't grow on trees. A tank company could easily be reduced to pillboxes if their fuel doesn't show up; they've been taken out of the fight without a single mech ever having engaged a single tank.
The mech doesn't have to be capable of fighting a tank to do this. It just has to be capable of fighting any non-tank ground target type and going through terrain that other vehicles can't, and this is very much achievable. Even just a .50-caliber machine gun would be enough to take out fuel trucks, railways, power generators, radar installations or parked aircraft; upgrading to 14.5mm would make it capable of fighting active attack helicopters without using up a missile. An army without fuel or ammunition isn't an army, and there's little to nothing conventional vehicles can do about this because they can't pursue the mech through tough terrain. This could have some very far-reaching effects on combat doctrine.