I mean, the idea of the Russians somehow launching a full scale invasion of the US and holding it for years was kinda dumb even at the time and that was before the Russian army started getting it's shit kicked in hard in Ukraine, which is literally their next door neighbor.
To be fair, the Russian army and the Soviet army are very different. The Soviet army was really good at the things it was designed to do, and was a credible peer to the US and NATO pretty much right up until the end.
The problem is, the Soviet army was built on the expectation of being in the Ukrainian position. It was designed to punch above its weight in a defensive war against a superior opponent. While NATO switched to professional volunteer armies, the Soviets kept conscription and focused on maintaining an absolutely massive strategic reserve which cost much less to maintain but could be mobilized extremely fast.
And it's still kept that basic form even as the USSR collapsed, military spending halved, corruption became rampant and the political character of the country changed.
The problem with conscript armies, as the US found out in Vietnam, is that while you can technically conscript people by force it causes a lot of problems. Conscription works best when people are motivated to fight, for example when they're defending their homeland as opposed to invading someone else's homeland. The population of the Russian federation today are not really ideologically motivated, in fact they're exceptionally depoliticized, and that doesn't make for a good population to conscript from. Hence, the force fighting in Ukraine is a weird mix of a handful of prestige units (that have generally been inadequately supported and underperformed), massively under-strength units who were meant to be filled from the strategic reserve but can't because limited conscription, people forcibly conscripted from the breakway republics with shoddy or ancient equipment, poor or desperate people on short-term emergency volunteer contracts (and another serious problem is that some of those contracts are likely to start ending soon), prisoners who have been offered reduced sentences for volunteering, mercenaries and volunteer militias representing fringe political movements (mostly nazis) and Chechens who seem to spend most of their time videoing themselves shooting empty houses in Belarus.
Again, it's interesting to make the comparison with China. China, unsurprisingly, used to have a very Soviet-inspired military until quite recently, but made a fairly difficult political decision to massively downsize the armed forces, switch to a more NATO-style volunteer model and use the money freed up by not paying salaries to focus on a massive modernization program. China doesn't pretend to be a military peer of the US, but it has made clear that it wants to be and has a clear and workable plan to get there within the next few decades.
The Russian army just seem to be a bit of a mess. It's a mess on a conceptual level, it's a mess because it's gutted by corruption and it's a mess because all its money seems to have gone on stupid shit and not fundamental things like making sure officers have encrypted radios and haven't sold all their fuel just before a war starts.
