> pretty much everyone at this point has discovered that laws and capitalism with some welfare trimmings on the edge is a much better approach than any alternative that got tried.

Have they? Aside from maybe Revolutionary Catalonia, which only stood up for a few years*, we haven't actually tried anything else since the emergence of capital. Obviously pre-neolithic humans lived under a different model, but that is because capital didn't exist yet.

The closest thing to an aberration was the USSR. Despite all the lip service paid to trying to suggest otherwise, in the end it remained under capitalism, standing out only because a small group of capitalists managed to seize control of all the capital.

* Which ironically, given what the USSR stood for on paper, fell down to war pressure from the USSR. Less ironic when you remember that the USSR was, in practice, actually most interested in capitalism for the benefit of the "elite", of course.