Socialism is a system that via a people's democracy mostly puts academics and engineers into power.
What you call "democracy" is liberal democracy that mostly puts merchants/marketers and lawyers into power.

A system that puts marketers in power and a system that rewards people for the fruits of their labor according to their ability, are incompatible because the whole job of a marketer/merchants is to profit as much as possible. And the 'Trias Politica judiciary & law-graduated politicians' live off of the marketer's money so they won't be able to stop their influence on them, unless they can scare them into submission through the fear of socialist revolutions, which they did when the Gilded Age was ending.
That's not possible anymore. The Soviet Union has fallen, oligarchic marketers of today are born in wealth and went through a process of 'retire rich early or live your life chasing profit' elimination round, unlike those in the 1930s and further automation has caused the marketers to have even more monetary power than those during the Gilded Age.

Why are you framing people's democracy as less democratic than bourgeois dictatorship?

Italy LOVES fascism, there’s no way

Latin America is my vote, could happen in Mexico, I would have voted Argentina better Milei, and maybe Venezuela before Trump.

Truthfully though, I think we're locked in, globally, permanently to Capitalism and right wing ideology into the end of humanity now for deeply complex reasons.

The game changed drastically this year and most people are just not aware how literally impossible it is to change.

Second wave socialist revolutions overthrowing the judiciary and merchantry, not second wave capitalist revolutions overthrowing the clergy and aristocracy/nobility.

Marxist-Leninist model has everything to do with China's development. You can read this book on the subject which explains how China's rise is a direct product of Marxist central planning.

The whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that even though USSR had state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that’s true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism.

And this is precisely what socialism is. It's a transitional stage between a capitalist society and a future communist society where the working class has seized the control of the state, but existing material relations have not yet been abolished.

Also worth noting that the state in China is firmly in control of the commanding heights of the economy.

The actual innovation in China is in combining high level central planning with dynamic allocation. The problem with Soviet economy was that any large system will produce a lot of noise as information travels through it. So, when you do central planning the way USSR was, it becomes very difficult to balance things. You make a plan, the directives travel down to the factories and farms where production happens, there's delay in the information arriving, mistakes in transcription, and so on. Then the same thing happens on the way back up, so the picture at the top is divergent from the situation on the ground. And that leads to things like overcorrections, and plans based on false data, so the system becomes unbalanced over time. And that's what we saw happen in USSR. I can highly recommend reading Thinking in Systems for a deeper explanation of the problem.

Now, that doesn't mean that the idea of central planning itself is wrong. The problem is with trying to do micromanagement at high level which just doesn't work. And this is the problem China figure out how to solve by using markets as allocators within the centrally planned system. The planners still set five year plans, they still control the commanding heights of the economy, and give overall direction on what types of things should be produced, but the details are left to market mechanisms to work out dynamically at the appropriate level. And this type of a hybrid system is proving to be highly effective.