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You're not wrong that the left-progressive memeplex draws a lot from Marx. However, as someone with some training in intellectual history, I would insist that really modern progressives have a pretty-attenuated relationship with Marx. They tend to directly interface more with more recent thinkers who have fairly radically-expanded the Marxian canon from its original roots: e.g. the Critical Theorists and Fanon incorporated Freud, Friere incorporated both Fanon and Rousseau/Dewey, all incorporated their own original insights, and so on. So yes, its "Marxist"...but there's an awful lot of elaboration in there, to the point that it's really unclear what Marx himself would think of it, or whether he would even recognize it if you could unearth and revive him. One analogy might be that modern progressivism is Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian. Like, where's the Marxism in the proliferation of radically-divergent sexual mores among the professional classes and capital-owning bourgeois classes? I could buy it if you were talking about the broader left-socialist tradition, referencing important contemporaries of Marx who time has rendered more obscure like Fourier and Robert Owen, but not Marx. In a lot of ways, modern leftists insist they are in a Marxian tradition as much to gain the cachet associated with asserting a famous genealogy than they do because they really care about and have deeply drawn from Kapital etc.
But all this wrangling over the intellectual history (which is incredibly rich and complicated and admittedly fun to wrangle over) aside, if you're seeking to understand and grok modern leftism you're not going to do it just by looking at Marx. And if you want to combat modern leftism you're not going to get very far just by calling it "Marxist." I don't think modern progressivism is an intellectual movement; not really. It, at least as it manifests in its politically-relevant common outbreaks is a morality, a teleology, an zeitgeist; a system of unfalsifiable, unquestioned assumptions about virtue and value that people feel more as vibes, aesthetics, and a priori interpretive lenses than they do as rational arguments for any particular falsifiable theory. It's not any rational system of thought that turns a completely normal list of basic life tasks...and turns it into icky ragebait with the addition of "...for a husband and family" to the end of each of them. Marx is a lot of things, but he's not that, and to the extent his thought has been absorbed into it, it's part of a lot richer inheritance including deracinated, desacralized protestantism, and the same leveller impulse that even appears in some of the wilder parts of the Christian tradition (such as, famously, Christ's admonition to forsake family and wealth to follow Him, the Diggers, Waldensians, early-church communes described in parts of the Book of Acts, and a lot of the religious movements Engels was banging on about in "The Peasant's War in Germany"). And if you want to address it, you need to do so on its own level - catechism of the young, and evangelization (or de-conversion) of adults where possible.
Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.
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