I think your biggest issue is that you’re comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people’s access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn’t even reached full Capitalism yet, then I’m afraid you aren’t being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was “good.” However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people’s lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn’t go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers’ freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.