These fucking dipshits lol, its winter, so the trees are missing leaves and there’s coal smog on everything, which was in wide use in the west just as it was in the east because it was cheap and domestically abundant. The reason it held on longer in the east after reunification is because the east was economically hollowed out and coal continued to be cheap compared to retrofitting in modern heating.
Here’s a picture from the late 60s(?) that’s not in winter (though it unfortunately frames out the large trees that are visible in the foreground of the reddit OP):
I think the Western capitalist brain is expecting to see every city filled with bright and colorful ads urging the population to CONSUME.
No, it’s genuinely just “bad country bad” is that deeply ingrained (well and picking photos that match their expectations). they’ll see pictures of pyongyang decked out in pastels (maybe the photo will be a little undersaturated but still with colors visible) and say the same shit all the comments about the GDR said on this post, “oh its so gray and depressing”, “oh there’s hardly any people in the streets” (there’s probably dozens of pedestrians but only a few cars)
They’ll look at Shanghai glowing bright and say the same thing