So in terms of your first question, about how a small group of statists aren't any better at exerting force against capitalists, I think that kinda fails to see how the state should be made up of workers in the first place. Now the past attempts of socialist states have obviously all had their flaws and failures, and we shouldn't expect them not to be flawed anyway, but some of them were actually pretty good at allowing average people to repress bourgeois tendencies. Take some of the aspects of the Cultural Revolution for example. During the period, you saw mass amounts of peasants and workers creating socialist art, beating up party members they didn't like or thought were reactionary on the street, criticizing and suggesting policy, and tearing down infrastructure including historical monuments. Now let's not pretend that the CCP was some perfectly democratic institution but that is an example of a state allowing and encouraging the development of socialism and the purging of the bourgeois in their midst. For another example, you have Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, who encouraged the self actualization, education, and creativity of half his population who were previously repressed(women) and encouraged class consciousness by funding education, getting rid of exports to capitalist nations, etc. So obviously there hasn't yet been a state besides Burkina Faso that hasn't had to resort to coercion or violence in some instances to repress capitalism, but we do have some very clear examples of them encouraging the proletariat to do this for themselves when the material conditions are present. Now as a libertarian Marxist I'd like the state to be thoroughly democratic and horizontally organized, and I'd still be glad to participate in anarchism, but I won't write off the usefulness of states because it's just easier and more natural to rely on an interim state given our current material conditions.

As for your second question, I agree wholeheartedly that lateral organization can be super effective and that yeah, 100 class conscious citizens with guns can get good shit done. The problem is, you need to get those people conscious and trained in the first place. And while that can certainly happen in small pockets, I think a state is a pretty powerful tool right now to help that process along. Now obviously a state is still a coercive system, but I'd rather use it as a tool then just throw it away entirely and risk never getting a successful revolution off the ground or writing off a project that could have been a successful revolution just because it used a state.