I agree with the overall sentiment that a significant portion of the population needing to understand theory for a revolution is completely false (that's what the vanguard is for!) but it's gonna be a long while (like probably at least a century or so) for Americans material conditions to be anywhere near poor enough for them to want to risk their lives

You're completely correct. And the Bolsheviks also faced the issue of being outright atheistic in a country where the vast majority were fairly devout peasants for many of whom the Tsar was still a religious figure and who couldn't really imagine what developed capitalism, let alone socialism, would mean. It's also important to note that this was not an exclusively rural issue, as the majority of urban workers and soldiers had come fairly recently from peasant contexts.

In other words they had their work cut out for them in many ways that contemporary communists in the Imperial core do not. On the other hand, Russia in 1917 was not a society in which the core values necessary for the functioning of a capitalist society had fully imbued everyday culture and life in the way they had already done in Western countries and as is the case in the contemporary world, which is more capitalistic than any point prior to the 1980s (though I would argue that this peaked in the late 90s/early 2000s). The transformation of politics into another identitarian symbol and virtue-signalling component of western ultras' personal aesthetics is a reflection of this conception of politics as a part of personal identity, of the construction and selling of oneself as a purely aesthetic product. For many leftists in the west their leftism amounts mainly to a form of lifestyle aesthetics, and often as a kind of surrogate or substitute form feelings of communal belonging and spiritual, religious or historical meaning and significance. Now I'm not saying the latter are unimportant or necessarily bad in every respect, but it does seem to be the extent of the political participation of most people self-identifying as socialist in the west. Capitalism obviously sells us the opiates to lessen the anguish of the sense of nihilism it also naturally produces, and it has become less and less shy or reluctant to do so by repackaging leftist, socialist or communist symbols. This has a broader, more indirect effect on culture, which doesn't reduce to, say, a capitalist firm selling Che Guevara t-shirts. A great example from American popular culture is Hip Hop. Contemporary mainstream rap, especially trap, in many ways reflect how the political radicalism of 70s black politics was transmuted into the popularized black petit bourgeois entrepreneurialism of the 1980s, and which you see in contemporary rap music everywhere, only where the American dream ideology takes the classic form of socio-economic ascent from the lumpenproletariat as opposed to the traditional working class. Political radicalism is far less at the forefront of Hip Hop than it was in the 80s.

The key thing that the West is lacking is not dislike for the conditions of capitalism. Your average worker also does not think that the conditions capitalism forces them to live in are acceptable. The issue is that they do not think of these as the natural or inevitable conditions of capitalism. Most people cannot define capitalism, let alone correctly. One of the issues for contemporary communists definitely seems to me to be that of how to make clear sense of the fact that while the conditions of capitalist life in the West are worsening for the majority, there has not been more impulse towards the construction of vanguard parties. Definitely relevant is the general cultural factor mentioned above, as well as a truly industrial propaganda-media complex that leverages the 'failures' (real and imagined) of previous attempts at socialism and plays without shame on ideas of nationalism (including liberal ones of very limited modern progress on social issues in the US) in order leave little room for people to feel comfortable expressing openly communist ideas. Poor education is also an issue.