The Badger is presented as a specialised IFV packing formidable firepower for a vehicle of it's role, but with limited AP capacity so that it doesn't go thinking it's a tank and can deal with enemy armour.

In practice, it almost seems to do the opposite of it's intended function: it can fully decimate solid walls in a single shot, but can be shrugged off by raiders literally wearing nothing be a T-shirt as though each high-explosive round packs nothing more than a wet fart. So far, the highwayman has actually been far more effective when it comes to dealing with enemy infantry due to actually dealing damage and it's superior rate of fire.

The blast radius can in theory deal AOE, but in the event that your enemies are in fact packed close enough together for this to be relevant, you're going to either be overwhelmed anyway or have enough firepower to render the Badger presence meaningless.
It's not like the AOE is so aggressive that you're liable to run into friendly fire incidents as long as you don't actively deploy your infantry directly into the line of fire.

All in all, I just think the gun is kind of a let down when this is ostensibly your incentive to restore the Badger instead of the Paladin.