For me it goes back to, what is our motivation in use of the (ill defined) word “fascism”, is it to simply mean:
Any bad, authoritarian regime
or
A unifying ideology shared between Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s and 1940s
I think much of the early usage of the term fascism in English sought to use it for the latter purpose. For that purpose, I would say if you’re trying to make likenesses between those three regimes, ethnic nationalism is a key component of it. So too is “private enterprise bent to the will of the state.”
I would argue Stalin’s USSR did not share those features, and thus would not be considered fascist.
To me the phrase you use:
IMHO, the basic feature of fascism is that the rulers basically control everything
That is sort of a core element of fascism, in a sense, although often implemented in different ways. An Italian (anti-fascist) philosopher of the 1920s, Giovanni Amendola coined the term totalitario to argue that Italian fascism was distinctly different than other known (at the time) forms of dictatorship. Essentially that in a “normal” dictatorship, the dictator runs things, the military, creates the laws and controls the police and gets to set the national agenda, but typically most ordinary people’s lives aren’t terribly different. Historical, pre-modern dictators often emerged out of already semi-free or illiberal societies to begin with, so the lack of liberty associated with dictatorship was not all that big of a change for most of the public, often times historical dictators emerged to replace (temporarily) corrupt oligarchies or monarchies, themselves illiberal institutions.
Fascism was seen as different because it actually wanted to bend everything to the state. Mussolini himself said “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Contrast this with the despotic monarchy of say, Louis XIV, an absolutist. Louis saw himself as synonymous with the state, but did not see that the state had business in every aspect of the country’s day to day operations. It wasn’t the business of the state to run farms and mercantile activities etc.
But I also argue that if you cut out the ethnonationalist element that was also tied closely to WW2’s fascist regimes, you essentially turn fascism into a simple synonym of “totalitarianism”, in which case you can call most modern (i.e. 20th century and 21st) despotic countries fascist. That’s fine in a sense, if going back to the start, you just mean fascist as a word to broadly mean “a bad autocracy.” But that wasn’t quite how it was used at the time of its origin.
I do think even as these terms were being fleshed out, there were actual significant Western political concerns in some of this phraseology, which is why I think the consensus definitions get so tortured. There was always a major school of thought that didn’t want to just lump all the Communists together with the other dictators.