The problem with these counts is there is no way of making them look good, like lives saved due to "x". How many people lived because the Soviets managed to eliminate all famines in their territory after that? A huge feat given their relative frequency beforehand.

And then you can blame countless deaths on capitalism, feudalism, slavery, but then do you normalize those numbers based on total world population?

What about blaming AK-47s? The police?

My point is that it's a pointless metric that is only used to drum up support against some group of people, not a useful one for objectively understanding anything. It does away with all context, and replaces it with some inane number.

No they don't.

But you're just proving the trope asked about in the original post.

I think the point is that it's difficult to attribute that to communism in any meaningful way where you're comparing it to non-communism. Like if those 100 million people would have died anyway, how to do you say 'it was communism that did it' since maybe more would have died under the next most likely form of government that would have been in it's place. How many people have died for Democracy, assuming that both world wars and countless other ones were fought to defend it.