People greatly underestimate the amount of resources that Russia had at its disposal. Yes, it was a backwater by many European standards, but a large contributing factor to the heat of WWI and politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was that everybody knew Russia was about to industrialize and become unstoppable. It's not as simple as "Stalin was cruel and goal-oriented and brought Russia from a third world nation to a second world nation ezpz", because Russia had way more resources available to them than, say, Laos, Angola, or Sioux. You can also see how the stalinistic rule of Laos or Angola did not result in what it resulted for in Russia.
Also Paradox is shy of including genocides in their games and likely won't model that at all.
It can be both a method of displaying information and silly. Personally, I don't think it's a good method of displaying information, either. I mean for one, this means that either all the buildings in the world have to look the same, or you have to memorize every different version for this "displaying information" to be useful, which seems pretty counterintuitive to me. Second, I don't know about you, but I have never zoomed in and looked at the map to see that kind of information, rather than just click on the state or province, and anecdotally I have literally never seen nor heard of anyone doing any differently. Zooming in rather than just clicking takes longer, is less clear, ironically obscures more of your vision than a little submenu taking up 1/12th of the screen, and also does not look particularly good. Part of the reason it doesn't look good when you max zoom on a province is because the textures are low quality and the map is low resolution. Part of the reason is because it looks silly to have 37 monopoly buildings sprinkled from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande.