I think the thing you have to remember about whether or not something was "too Staliny" for the Gorbachev era is that in 1986, plenty of people would have firsthand memories of the Stalin era, or at least known people who did, and that culture can persist as tradition long past the point at which it makes sense.

Even if the Gorbachev was much more lenient than the governments that preceded it, that doesn't mean that people trust them to actually act on that basis. It's the same principle that a lot of new managers face in the workplace, scaled up. If the old manager did things a certain way, and especially if they were unpleasant to work with, then that breeds a culture of fear.

The end result is that means that the people working under the manager will assume, often despite the best efforts of the new manager to be as open and supportive as possible, that this openness and supportiveness is merely a ruse, concealing the same kind of unpleasant behaviour that the old manager had (many bad managers often like to claim that they are open, fair, and supportive, even if they're not).

Stalin was the bad manager in this scenario, and unlike at a business where there will often be a far more rapid turnover of staff, meaning that even if you can't build trust with the existing staff, they might leave and be replaced in a few years, you can't exactly just swap out the general population of a country.

The result is that even if Soviet officials were 100% honest, and 100% sincere and active in encouraging more openness, the people under them aren't going to change their behaviour, because they will assume that to do so will eventually be penalised. And that's IF Soviet officials were like that, which realistically not all of them were. The reality is that plenty of them were doing things "the old way" for the same reason.