Sure but why pretend that it was exclusively an anarchist project. There were multiple leftist tendencies involved and it would have fallen sooner if not for direct material support from gasp Stalin and the USSR. The anarchist elements of the Spanish project can not be singled out as uniquely successful compared to the ML and other leftist tendencies

"exemplar communist prototype"

fails

How can the actual outcome of said revolution be praised if it failed? Even by the account of most anarchists, they were quite easily controlled by the Republican state since the May Days onwards. Destabilizing from the inside the war industry of a faction engaged in a civil war against fascism is not a victory in my book. Ffs, even the Nazis were rooting for the Anarchists in Barcelona and infiltrated them to promote a revolution against the Republican Spanish government (see Harro Schulze-Boysen's execution by Nazi Germany).

My ancestors have had to endure fascism due to the incapability of the Spanish revolution to put a stop to them. My fucking parents were singing Cara al Sol every morning in their summer camps doing the fascist salute. And I'm living the consequences of said system. If the argument is "ML power structures end up reproducing capitalism", by that logic anarchism is 100 times worse.

This "debate" was settled after WW2 to anyone willing to look at the material reality. "The Anarchists losing to fascists in Spain is actually good, whereas the Bolsheviks saving the entirety of Eastern Europe from extermination at the hands of Nazism is authoritarian" is a particularly disgusting form of historical nihilism.