Correct on every point, afaict.

I’m not entirely sure, but it is an interesting question. I could see “late stage capitalism” serving as a low political literacy way of alluding to capitalist badness without blaming capitalism fundamentally. I believe it was Lenin who said that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism? In that sense, imperialism is late stage capitalism. But the way I can recall some using the term in years past, it may get used more like as synonymous with saying “capitalism in decline/decay”; pointing at dystopian things and saying, they exist because capitalism is in its end-game or something like that.

But a more detailed marxist analysis would show that capitalism has terribleness to it at every “stage” and form of it. Its problems are fundamental, not fixable with different capitalism, and that is an important distinction, versus an implication one might take from LSC alone, that the problem is the stage capitalism is in. Reforms, for example, can do some harm reduction in the short-term, giving the perception of capitalism being less bad than it is, but can’t resolve the contradictions or even act as a buffer against them in the long-term.

Put another way, every stage of capitalism is a stage where exploitation is fundamental to the system. Communism seeks to resolve this, and marxism-leninism more specifically seeks to resolve this through a communist vanguard managing a socialist transition state, one in which the vanguard has control over key production and distribution. Capitalism wasn’t good before people were calling it “late stage”, but it may have been an easier life for a higher percentage of people when more reforms were in place to stave off communist revolution.

I’ve taken LSC to be a term used in the same vain as “corporatism”. That it’s in fact greed that is the problem, not the system itself. I think it’s seen as amother form of “extremism” that is pushed by liberal ideology in order to maintain systemic stagnation.