I've been seeing a worrying number of these people on Lemmy lately, sharing enlightened takes including but not limited to "voting for Biden is tantamount to fascism" and "the concept of an assigned gender, or even an assigned name, at birth is transphobic" and none of them seem to be interested in reading more than the first sentence of any of my comments before writing a reply.
More often than not they reply with a concern I addressed in the comment they're replying to, without any explanation of why my argument was invalid. Some of them cannot even state their own position, instead simply repeatedly calling mine oppressive in some way.
It occurred to me just now that these interactions reminded me of nothing so much as an evangelical Christian I got into an argument with on Matrix a while ago, in which I met him 95% of the way, conceded that God might well be real and that being trans was sinful and tried to convince him not to tell that to every trans person he passed, and failed. I am 100% convinced he was trolling -- in retrospect I'm pretty sure I could've built a municipal transport system by letting people ride on top of his goalposts (that's what I get for picking a fight with a Christian at 2AM) -- and the only reason I'm not convinced these leftists on Lemmy are trolls is the sheer fucking number of them.
I made this post and what felt like half the responses fell into this category. Am I going insane?
No, you're moving the goal posts, lol, and trying to deflect blame is pointless here. "Successful Communist Revolutions" was vague in the first place, and the original point was that reform is extremely difficult to outright impossible, while Revolutions have succeeded.
If you can go back in time and redefine the original question, go for it.
China is indisputably better off than it was under the fascist Kuomintang. This isn't even a point to argue, China under Mao doubled their life expectency, then under Deng managed to become the industrial hub of the world, and now under Xi has taken China finally to the level of superpower.
China absolutely has numerous issues to this very day. Corruption is high, treatment of minorities is at minimum suspicious, and protesting gets met harshly. However, if you compare China under the KMT to China today, it isn't even a question.
So yes, you may need to take a look at what these countries were actually like before Revolution and compare with post.