Don't get distracted by the word communism!
People want more value for more work. If I work 12 hours picking potatoes and have to give 3/4 of them "according to my need" I will refuse to work. If you create fake jobs like "bolt counter" to insure 100% employment so the means can justify the ends (as communism believes) you end up with a collapsing economic system.
The current iteration of late-stage capitalism is not capitalism _at large_. It's feudalism clever disguised as an egalitarian economic system. The solution to this is not communism, it's undoing 100 years of stock-market oriented business design. We don't know what "late-stage" communism looks like simply because a revolution occurs several hundred years before it reaches that point. Not even the premiere implementers of communism, the Russians, could keep their system.
It doesn't work. In any country, in any system, with any group of people larger than 4.
Like you note thoigh, we can have a free market and democracy without that dynamic
Which is why the powers that be have to pass things like this: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/hr5349/text/eh to keep people confused, and to conflate being opposed to shareholders (capitalism) with support for authoritarianism etc.
Don't fall for the trap of accepting "late-stage capitalism" as a valid concept - it's a made-up term that has no concrete or meaningful definition and is used by Marxists to constantly move goalposts and impute bad things into our functional (if suboptimal) economic system.