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You can avow, believe, and teach something all day long. That doesn’t mean you are that thing.
China is about as Marxist-Leninist as the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. If you want to “no true Marxism-Leninism has ever been tried” me, then go ahead, but in a real sense yes the CCP is a successful Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and minor alterations in economic doctrine over the last forty years do not change that fact.
Well, that is true, but only in the trivial sense that the ideology is incoherent, and therefore it can't actually be tried. If China was truly MLM, then they would at least be on the path towards the withering away of the state and the transition to a classless, moneyless society - they would at least have it as a goal. But plainly the leadership of China does not view this as a desirable goal in any sense. And I don't blame them - it's not a coherent goal, it's not something that can actually be achieved.
I don't know what level of centralized state planning it would take for me to say that China has a different "economic system" than the US. I haven't thought much about it. I'm skeptical of the idea that we can meaningfully speak of different types of economic systems in the first place - I'm skeptical of the idea that there was a distinct "feudalist mode of production" for example. The US, like China, also has government management of the economy and public-private cooperation. It strikes me as a difference of degree rather than kind.
If "Marxism-Leninism was a spent force by the 1980s" means anything, then I think it would mean something like "by the 1980s, even the true believers recognized that the global socialist utopia was not going to materialize". And I don't think there are any true true believers among China's leadership or intelligentsia today. True believers in central state planning, sure - but Marxism never took central state planning to be its ultimate goal.
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