I mean, those of us with Marxian biases define it that way -- not right wingers -- and see "social democrats" in the 21st century as being the people who successively turned the term to mean instead anything-where-government-does-stuff. That's effectively what it came to mean in the US.

Notably, the definition given by Marx and other 19th century socialists (worker controlled production) is doesn't even have to involve government or the state at all. It just came to mean that once proximity to power came into play. The "soviet" word merely meant local worker councils, not a state form, for example. But once the Bolsheviks took state power, the power of the actual soviets was successively demolished in favour of a centralized one party state.

So, notably: Self-called "Marxist-Leninists" in the USSR, and Social Democrats (or "democratic socialists" in the US), and Right-wingers all far prefer the term to mean "government controls things." The latter because they can then point fingers and call things authoritarian (but somehow exempt corporate power from critique).

But it is not at all clear that 19th century socialists .. from Proudhon through Marx etc -- who coined the term -- meant this at all.

Also this hard line between "communism" and "socialism" is fictitious and very schematic. All communists call themselves socialists, and almost none of them agree on what that means.

Social democrats trying desperately to sound respectable clearly want a nice hard line there. But they also have no intention of bringing about socialism.