I think we all want democracy. And, actually, plenty of existing socialist states do have democratic processes, despite being under threat from the United States. Cuba, for example, has regular elections and a large system of citizen councils. Here’s a video about Cuban democracy

You probably can’t start a Capitalism Party in Cuba and hand out leaflets saying “We should sell our land and factories to American businesses!” — because if Cuba allowed that, America would pour a billion dollars a year into funding and training and staffing that party, insert CIA agents into the staff, publish a Capitalism Party newspaper full of slander and propaganda, engineer Cuban elections, and start to gnaw at Cuba from the inside. The party would become a beachhead for counterrevolution.

Restrictions on democracy in communist countries are a wartime measure to fend off capitalists. The more open and democratic your country is, the greater the attack surface. That doesn’t mean actually existing socialist (AES) states have no democratic processes at all, but they have to be vigilant and ensure that positions of power are occupied by committed and capable socialists.

successful real world examples of communism such as the PRC vs the only ever failed attempts at a socialist country

you label the successful, presumably less democratic nations “communist,” and the failed, presumably more democratic nations “socialist,” but I would say the terms communist and socialist don’t really work that way. To be honest we mostly use the terms interchangeably lol, but I would say “Socialist” is a descriptor while “Communist” is a goal, where you aspire to be a classless, moneyless, stateless society in the future, and to survive in the meantime while keeping capitalists out of power.