Regarding the misunderstanding about the sway bar, is it better to be thicker or strong?

The force of the sway bar to make the left and right wheels move up and down. If the sway bar too strong, the left and right wheels will lose too much independence.

From a comfort perspective, the undulations on the road surface are mostly left and right out of sync, and a hard sway bar can make the comfort worse.

In addition, the sway bar also a transmission path for vibration.

When the uneven road surface causes wheel vibration, especially when the left and right are not synchronized, this vibration will be transmitted to the sway bar, and then transmitted to the vehicle body (or sub frame) through the connection point between the sway bar and the vehicle body (or sub frame). This is also why the sway bar needs to be fixed to the vehicle body through rubber bushings, in order to isolate some of the vibration.

By the way, it should be noted that sway bar bushings are beneficial for comfort, but not necessarily for handling stability - in the early stages of vehicle tilting, the deformation of the sway bar bushings will be more obvious, and the effect of the sway bar will be masked.

So competitive modifications often make the sway bar liner harder.

For off-road vehicles, too strong a sway bar weakens the independence of the left and right wheels, causing loss of adhesion.

So off-road vehicles dislike sway bars, especially those that are too strong. Some high-end off-road vehicles will be equipped with active sway bars - the sway bars work normally when driving on the road, but do not work when disconnected during off-road driving, in order to achieve a balance between off-road performance and road driving performance.