The old euphemism is true. Money is power. Acute income inequality inevitably ends in power inequality. Crony capitalism is a by product of countries that lean too much on capitalism. Our oligarchs/capitalist, like Gates and Bezos, buy our media or control our communication via social media like here to completely control the narrative for example. Big government, big corporations, big oligarchs, etc., it's all worthy concern, but most have blinders to one or two of these items.

There's more than one way to skin a cat imo. Facilitating worker productivity while maintaining efficient markets hasn't been exclusive to capitalism. From my perspective, capitalism is mainly focused on putting the productivity gains from workers in the pocket of capitalist, leading to large income inequality and consequently power inequality, which makes economies leaning too much on capitalism unable to sustain functioning democracies. US capitalist have always had disproportionate power, but as inequality grows, I don't think normal people even have the illusion they have any meaningful control over their government.

No country can, or has, maintained this type of growth with capitalism alone. There is no reason to pick and chose. This isn't a zero sum game. Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, etc. are not mutually exclusive, and generally do work together. US propelled it's economy with a surge of socialism from the new deal. China dwarfs India's economic growth since the 90s because they have embraced mixed economics more. Mixed economics is what made the US great, won the 2nd world War, and fueled the new deal despite propaganda saying otherwise.