No you are on the correct track. Tankies arent at all the most left. They are authoritarian which is more right than they want to admit. Just being anti capitalism isn't an instant moral win.

They'll argue that it's the best way while ignoring that basically every instance of communism in modern history is basically a dictatorship that used communist ideals as a medium to gain power.

Like fuck capitalism but power centralization and militarized authoritarianism is not the "fix"

Tankies are state capitalists.

I don't know about the semantics anymore, so it's upto you if you want to say they are 'left', but anarchist spaces are the best of the bunch.