The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you're making right now.

lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn't exist

Under Mao Zedong, China's life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.

As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn't bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn't have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.