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Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it.
As far as I can tell, Karl Marx knew that a classless, stateless society would get rolled by a central state immediately if capitalism still existed. So, the plan was to seize the state and implement socialism, and wait for every other society in the world to dissolve their states at once. Anyone who is really thinking could tell you that that would never happen, especially looking at the pathetic state of any genuinely central government behemoths of socialist states at the time. And yet, all kinds of Marxists, probably except for the anarchist movement, want to stack the bodies to create this ideology that will never work and is unfalsifiable, and will end up stacking even more bodies, accidentally and intentionally.
There are any number of posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism where they express their utter disdain for liberals. Every post on /r/TheRightCantMeme has an automod message that says that the subreddit is a far left one, and that liberals can fuck off. But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.
More than anything, it's the biggest slap in the face that accusations of communism or marxism are laughed off, when the share of open Marxists has seemingly increased exponentially in the last couple of decades.
Just two cents more on this. The most serpentine Marxists define socialism as the workers owning the means of production, without reference to state force. Alright then, what's stoppin' ya'? Surely someone could get a small business loan from Geroge Soros or somebody to start a small business -- say, a Taco Bell franchise -- that was collectively owned by the workers, and you're off to the races with your socialist experiment. Why no clamor for this from the Socialists? Not a peep?
The reason is that we know, and they know, that the truly employee-owned-and-managed Taco Bell would be almost certain to go out of business, beaten in the market by competitors owned by investors who hold the personnel accountable from the top down. It turns out that managing the means of production is a skill, that it is crucial to the success of any business, and that most cashiers and taco-makers don't have it. So... the only way that business can exist is with heavy handed, forcible intervention in the market -- say, to force all of its competitors into the same model. And then all of their suppliers (because the employee-run business can't afford market prices for stock and equipment), and all of their customers (because otherwise they buy from the lowest bidder to cut costs, which would be a top-down managed company), transitively, until you get guess what? A po-lice state.
Yeah, workers' coops are an actually possible thing in America, but this is ignored.
I think anarchists are about the only faction of communism that realizes that they could just start communism with each other, in the form of workers' cooperatives and in communal villages, voluntarily. I think they are a far less harmful version of the ideology, and if all of the Marxists were instead anarchists, all the better; now you just have a bunch of people who vote left to shift the Overton window left without actually planning on doing anything nefarious (or doing much of anything at all, considering the anarchists I have interacted with).
Since anarchism is voluntary, the idea is that the commune shows people how things could be, and everyone slowly realizes the way things could be and join up themselves, I think. If the commune reaches a certain size, reality will check it and check it hard, so this bastion of freedom doesn't live very long and doesn't convince anyone who wasn't already a deviant. I consider that more benign, because it only disadvantages accountable people who willingly joined in.
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Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".
Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.
Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.
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