Not totalitarian you say?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purges_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
My experience in Azerbaijan also included tales of when they were children passing curds to starving prisoners through chain fences in Kazakh gulags. The Soviet Union did more harm than good to the leftist movement and is used as the scary example every single time someone begins to think twice about the capitalist system they live under. Socialism is forever tainted by the USSR and severely struggles to remove that image. Fuck the USSR.
I think you’re forgetting the power of consumers. At work you might not be able to replace Photoshop or Microsoft but at home you certainly can. The more people that become familiar with alternative software the more likely professional environments are to adopt it.
Why would a company want to pay Adobe or Microsoft if their employees are more adept with free alternatives? Especially if those alternatives gain feature parity with the paid services while the paid services lock parts behind paywalls and subscriptions.
Don’t let perfect get in the way of good!