Perhaps my reading of it is colored by how people tend to talk about that quote, either pointing to it to claim the later Soviet model of centrally planned state-owned businesses with a quasi-market system was "state capitalist" because Lenin used that term for the long-since-ended NEP, or to try to argue an idea of a strict progression through systems of economic organization and say that Soviets "had to make capitalism first because you can't just go from feudalism to socialism" which is also missing the point because it paints the capitalist stage itself as contributing a necessary character or the like (and also misrepresents pre-revolution Russia as fully feudal and agrarian, when it was actually an underdeveloped industrial capitalist state, albeit one that was rather far behind the other great powers in many respects), when the actions the early Soviets took were much more pragmatic and grounded in the material realities on the grounds.

I may also have worded my take on it poorly: what I mean is that I don't believe the early Soviets were just dogmatically following a prescribed order of development (which I've seen people misrepresent the NEP as before), but instead acted pragmatically based on their material limitations, that the regulated capitalism of the NEP wasn't because private enterprise is universally necessary to go from underdeveloped aristocratic capitalism to socialism but because the Soviet state itself had not yet established the sorts of central planning institutions and the logistics chain to support them that they would later rely on.