I don't think your comparison to Soviet central planning really works. As far as I understand it, Soviet central planning worked in long term plans and quotas, with orders given from GOSPLAN all the way down, and if factory owners disagreed they'd have to go send the information all the way up and back down the ladder, while the actual information on production would be manipulated to look good and sent manually by bureaucrats.

On the other hand, cybersyn had no quotas, and no long term rigid plans. Informational exchange did not have to go through bureaucrats, and could be done directly from the factory, eventually automatically by the equipment, and update a digital model that would do a large part of what the bureaucrats at GOSPLAN would do, but automatically and verifiably.

So it seems very, very different to me.

> If it's propaganda it seemingly worked on the wrong audience

Not uncommon though, right? The tankies have also adopted the narrative of China as a Communist threat, or in Latin America you end up with the paradoxical situation of most opposition parties in Venezuela belonging to the Socialist International, yet you find feverish and uncritical Maduro support among young radicalized left-wing Americans.

We have the same phenomenon in Germany where ironically the formerly West-German members of Die Linke have a much more cartoonish, ideological view compared to their actually ex-socialist former East-German counterparts.

Err, extensively even.