I think the Tankie Triad term is more about linking certain people with support for authoritarian policy, rather than socialism as a whole. There are a ton of people across Lemmy instances that think of themselves as socialist and reject authoritarianism. They might use the term "tankies" to distinguish between themselves and those socialists who might support "using tanks" to suppress dissent. So the distinction you see some draw could be more about that instead of socialists vs non-socialists. People on one side tend to paint socialists as liberals, and people in the other side tend to paint socialists as tankies. Reactionary comments are easy to make and aren't useful but people make them anyway for a myriad of understandable reasons so that's that. ๐ฅน
That's my understanding on this part of the issue so far.