Did the workers own their means of production? No. In fact, a lot of worker's cooperatives were not only nationalized, but turned into the same kind of exploitative enterprises they were made to escape the corporate world, but this time it was in the hands of the state, and the factory had "this factory belongs to the workers" written on it.

The Workers did own the Means of Production via a Worker State. It was fundamentally not "the same kind of exploitative enterprises" because production was not done in service of profit and accumulation in the hands of the few, but for and by the workers. We see the effects of this with high housing rates, free healthcare, education, and extremely low poverty rates.

Those are often done under more "human-faced" capitalist states. These states are just social-autocracies: all the social benefits of social democracies, without any democracy, unless you call liking a dictator and their pet projects at gunpoint a "democracy".

Every Socialist state has been democratic to some degree, believing the state is simply structuted entirely due to the whims of "powerful people" is laughably oversimplified. Social Democracies should be analyzed based on how they gained their resources. Social Democracy in the Global North is Imperialist, Social Democracy in the Global South is progressive, though not sufficient.

Running a worker state takes many cogs and many democratic movements, as compared with Capitalism where the bourgeoisie and the managers they employ have absolute say. It is a given that Capitalist employment is antidemocratic, when you measure only the State in Capitalism with the entirety of the economy and state in Socialism, without also acknowledging the utter lack of any democracy in the Capitalist economy, you are cherry picking.

Would my far-right government be considered a socialist country, because it boasts about record-high employment boosted by emmigration and the humiliating public employment program (work full 8+ hours at a state institute or street cleaner for half the minimum wage, so car makers don't have to pay taxes), and about higher and higher wages that are nearly completely offset by inflation? Is stuffing the prime minister's childhood friend with so much money he became a billionaire at the cost of smaller businesses going bankrupt a socialist move, just because he happens to be Hungarian (and also doesn't have "berg" in his family name, nor has a "suspiciously large nose" as some insiders told me why a Hungarian business needed to go)? I guess critical support for Viktor Orbán then, since he hates the west and its human rights...

Unsure of what this tangent has to do with the topic at hand.