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North Korea was never a Soviet pet project. It's a Chinese buffer state that the Chinese don't even particularly like, but that they keep up because it's either that or have the US military, which they previously fought in the Korean War and which threatened to blow nukes up and which likely used biological weapons*, on their border. Both the USSR and China materially supported North Korea, but since the Sino-Soviet…
Most of modern NK’s philosophical underpinnings are based on Juche, a syncretic philosophy of traditional East Asian thought and that of the Kim dynasty. References to Marx, Stalin, Lenin, etc, have been excised from this doctrine. NK is a very hierarchical society, reflecting traditional Korean social order.
And, to the point you made, NK is the way it is because of the inextricable psychic damage of the Korean war. Neither the South-allied or North-allied forces acted honorably and it shows in the distrust to this day. NK’s Juche-thought reflects a certain degree of psychological damage, like that of a child who never had any adult to trust and grows to trust no one and rely on no one.
All this to say, I think reducing this to communism == bad is an incredibly reductive leap. North Korea did not begin as a communist project, it began as an anti-imperialist one (against Japan). It’s evolution has been a result of the intense paranoia associated with a massive, incredibly destructive war (imagine if a third of the towns in your country disappeared in a decade). This was a war of few prisoners between fellow countrymen. Imagine had the South pushed the yankees back and then militarized their entire border.
I, of course, would rather live in the West than NK. It’s just far more complicated than a rote line.