The term to me feels like the other side of the coin from "That wasn't communism/Communism hasnt been tried", in that both attempt to deflect criticism in a pretty clumsy way that also ends up moving focus away from the living process of building socialism and communism.

FWIW its a better term/phrase than trying to convince people that communists doing things for communistical reasons in the service of building towards communism is not actually "real communism", but its still not ideal to just say that Socialism Actually Exists in a bunch of countries that do things very differently from each other and are in very different situations. You can't always write a big paragraph about how each country is running their own specific process to progress forward towards socialism, but there should be a better way to sum it up than AES.

As it is right now, using AES as a term is just inviting easy ridicule for implying that X country "is socialist" in the most literal economic sense, and then you're on the back foot trying to redefine shit and defend yourself.

Edit: Also of course, a significant amount of the time when people use the argument of X wasnt really socialism/communism, its actually an anticommunist argument attempting to delegitimize armed struggle and to demonize enemy countries in some crab mentality attempt to win legitimacy for succdem/demsucc movements in the west.