Socialist countries aren’t communist, you call them pre-communist which highlights my point.

This is just quibbling over semantics & context. When communists run a state, yes that state is technically socialist/pre-communist. That’s why those states have “Socialist” in their names and not “Communist.” There is never going to be a “communist state,” because definitionally communism’s long-term end-goal is a classless society. And since we define the state as a system which protects the interests of one economic class over others, such a society would definitionally be stateless.

So when someone—assuming they know what they’re talking about—says “communist state/country,” they mean a communist-led socialist state.