You are right there are a lot of duplicates, many of which are not even used in the game (for example all the different China factions have their own overlord gattling turrets, but their overlord tanks all use the standard China one, and all America factions have their own vehicle drone objects, but their vehicles only use the vanilla America ones).
I guess the plan was that each faction should have their own special types of everything but they did not get round to fully implementing the differences. You see clues that they were meant to be more different than they are in the fact that there are lots of unused sounds, strings, model art, button cameos, etc for different variants of units, like the laser ranger, laser aurora, laser comanche, laser humvee, nuclear tank hunter, hypersonic aurora, laser paladin, etc. I made use of some of these in my Laser-Demo-Nuke mod.
You are also right in the scripting use of these things. Especially in the Generals challenge maps where you have different factions fighting each other, object type lists are used to draw up attack priorities, targets for superweapons, and other things in scripts, so that the computer player can, for example, fire his particle beam at the nearest superweapon object belonging to the human (using an object type list of all the superweapon buildings of all the feactions EXCEPT the type belonging to the computer player's faction, so that he doesn't shoot his own building).
There should have been scripting commands to make this unnecessary (like the ones in the UNUSED script folder which are supposed to let an object use a command button on the nearest enemy object KindOf), but they were not implemented properly in Zero Hour and do not work.
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