Historical examples, like Revolutionary Catalonia for Anarchism, and the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc. for Marxism-Leninism, absolutely count as Socialist and should be learned from, both the good and bad.

If you dismiss them as "not real Socialism," you fail to learn from what did work in those instances, like literacy rates and life expectancy skyrocketing. If you dismiss the bad, you make the equal mistake of not accounting for the flaws in systems like Soviet Democracy, which resulted in a corrupt Politburo with outsized power.

Study them in detail and find what to take and what to leave behind.

I think we should learn from that. Maybe all forms of power solely resting within the governing function invites corruption.

I haven't given up yet on it because capitalism is definitely not working right now but there is a form of communism that you can have an informed and rational fear of.

That goes for anything, every system ever made by humans. Even the first forms of democracy, including direct democracy, falls under this umbrella. After all in the theory-world, where everything is ideal, humans do behave good so communism (but any form of good government is possible, even anarchy or a good autocracy).

In the real world, though, humans behave like humans so you get corruption and weird power play. So even if you got a nice working system where every human support society, it will inevitably fail under corruption after the first generations of those who put in place such a system die; which is exactly what happens throughout history each time, even in Athens.

Tldr: theoretical perfect system cannot exist in practice since we are flawed creatures