Even if you reduced every variant of an item in a supermarket from the 80s down to its essence, a supermarket would still cream a Soviet-era food market in selection, and most especially, reliability. I tried to find a "fair" picture of a Soviet-era market for you to see in Google images, but, all I could find were pictures of empty shelves. While this is not 100% representative, it does say something real.

If it is an "illusion", it's still built on a solid base of real choice that centralized government management completely failed to produce.