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I think the trick is there are two different ideas in play:
1. The setting of 40k is so horrible and lethal that for any civilization to survive it must be brutal, authoritarian, repressive, and fully oriented towards warfare. There's a moral question of how far you would be willing to go in this direction to minimize risk to yourself.
2. The Imperium is still much worse than it needs to be, because it's corrupt and dysfunctional and blinded by dogma. These are flaws by any metric, since they also undermine the Imperium's ability to fight aliens and Chaos.
And at the risk of throwing a wrench, I'd argue the Tau and Eldar are better examples of justified(?) fascism than the Imperium is. They have strong unitary states, they're heavily militarized, they have an ideology of genetic superiority but a willingness to cooperate with outsiders for strategic gain, they're relatively secular and meritocratic, and their citizens lead strictly regimented lives with the justification that it's needed to face external threats. Neither is super-close but they have parallels.
The Imperium is a feudal empire which is so poorly centralized that Terra can't keep track of entire planets, it's ruled over by an absentee monarch who claims divine right but with most real decisions made by his council of "High Lords", its Imperial Guard is a small fraction of the local PDFs, it has a weird ideology of just killing all outsiders on sight (but often unenforced), its ruling class is made up of centuries-old aristocratic families who control nearly all their society's wealth, all scientific knowledge is monopolized by an insular religious sect, and the lives that ordinary subjects lead are almost entirely determined by their local lords or governors. It's much more of a crumbling turn-of-the-century monarchy than a fascist state, and even its loyalists admit it has huge problems.
An Eldar autarch would be fine sacrificing a million human lives to save a single squad of guardians, or probably even acquiring some random artifact. They simply consider themselves that much more important. Can this be justified? Maybe, that's a moral question. It does pretty consistently benefit the Eldar.
But an Imperial admiral would potentially kill a million humans because an inquisitor mistyped something in his orders and he was too scared to ask if it was correct. And that inquisitor might kill an Eldar who was trying to warn him about a daemon because "aliens only lie!" That's just dysfunctional and hurts humanity's own survival. And there's a lot of that stuff endemic to the Imperium, alongside the more "rational" paranoia and brutality (which is at least to the faction's own advantage).
Now as for Chaos, I agree they're having a tough time. You can keep pure Chaos as evil, or at least inherently destructive, but there needs to be some incentive to work with it. There need to be stories of people making deals with Chaos and coming out ahead. That's the only way the decision has gravity. There should be at least some very slim possibility that Abaddon will get what he wants and take over the Imperium without becoming a slave to any of the gods, even if it's negligible.
Right now we don't get that. Chaos is always the wrong pick: sell your soul to become less powerful and lose more often. There's no dramatic tension to that. Gamblers wouldn't get ruined at the casino unless they were seeing some people winning big.
Furthermore, there are no regular human rebels in the game, or even rogue space marine chapters. Only Chaos and Genestealers. Which is really a shame, even a single special character in the Guard codex who was some rebel dictator with no ties to another faction would add a bunch of flavor with no extra work. And if all rebellion against the Imperium is ultimately discovered to come from Chaos or Genestealers how can you say they're tyrannical? Why is there no legitimate dissent?
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