The Soviet Union had armies of mathematicians and surveyors to try to predict manufacturing needs. That is like saying "just use surveys"! Equating retailers with the entirety of the chain is massive willful ignorance. It is like equating knowing how to repair a car with knowing the entire manufacturing process of the car down not just to the ore but to the "production" of the individual workers themselves!
There’s been a lot of technological progress since the Soviet Union’s demise.
There’s probably some point where running a full command economy becomes feasible with modeling, oppressive surveillance and repression, etc. Not sure I’d want to live in it, but “the Soviets failed” is a weak argument.
A command economy gets a lot easier if you can force people to work certain jobs and produce certain things. The Soviets had trouble with this because measurement and enforcement were challenging; they'd have loved Amazon's warehouse worker surveillance systems.
What we have under "capitalism" is essentially the Soviet wet dream: being able to force workers into work, "willingly", and they work so hard they piss into bottles to stay on target.
We've got all the repression right now, just for a slice of the population that everyone considers effectively disposable.
