and authoritarianism is a practically useless word that’s based purely on one’s ideology.

All states are authoritarian because they have monopolies on the use of violence. Liberals don’t view the routine weaponization of the bourgeois state against poor people as authoritarianism, but will instantly decry the reverse as such. Thus, a billionaire landlord evicting a single mother isn’t characterized as authoritarian, but Maoists giving landlords the boot is. Germany seizing the bank accounts of critics of Israel (as happened recently) isn’t labeled authoritarian, but the Stasi doing the same to corrupt capitalists in East Germany was.

Aaand we’ve reached authoritarianism isn’t real. Go ask average people what they think “authoritarianism” means and you’ll get answers that center around suppressing freedom of speech, journalism, censorship.

Are there people who do call your examples authoritarianism? Absolutely. But there are also real people who claim the earth is flat.

Why how odd you didn’t copy the entire block

What is a “tankie?” Tankie was originally a pejorative term referring to communists who supported the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 [87, 96]. Over the years, the context of the usage of tankie evolved. For example, it has been used to express derision towards pro-Soviet hardliners [42], to describe communists who support China’s policies [69] (e.g., supporters of China’s actions on Uyghurs [95] and the Hong Kong protests [7]), as well as young, online Stalinists in general [44].

Thus, tankie is now used to describe much more than the set of communists who supported specific events from the Soviet era. The term tankie now covers communists who support “Actually Existing Socialist” (AES) countries; especially those with a Stalinist or authoritarian leaning.

Thus it is of wide spread usage to mean “authoritarian communists” regardless of whether or not it’s in a bonafide dictionary. Which, I might add, is a follower not a leader in language.

Furthermore, the entirety of their large scale study seems to be based on that definition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.