Realistically, how could the USSR and the Warsaw Pact have prevented collapse?

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Not get sucked into Afghanistan, Andropov gets treatment earlier for his condition, make a sincere rapprochement with China, and focus on ramping up production of consumer goods.
- I think that the USSR fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan was mostly a good thing. The government asked for the USSR's assistance and lives were at stake.
  
  Firstly, you have fallen into the same trap that the leaders of the USSR did. The nominally socialist govt of Afghanistan was not widely popular with the masses because of their anti-Islam stance, among other things. Far more lives were lost due to the intervention and ofc set the stage for Afghanistan to become a failed state for many years.
  Second, the "Taliban" as we know it today was not formed until the 90s, the "Mujahideen" was the label applied to the various groups of anti-Soviet forces, of which there were several groups of different nationalities and types of Islam, but what united them was the common cause against the 'godless foreigners' from the north propping up a deeply unpopular regime. This gave the CIA a golden opportunity to turn Afghanistan into the USSR's Vietnam, as they pumped millions and millions of dollars/weapons into the country to whoever would take it, all funneled through Pakistan and their notorious secret service, the ISI. Iran and China also had a lesser role in this as well, believe it or not. By the end, the Mujahideen had some of the best weapons in the world inflicting huge losses on the Soviets and can be seen as one of the factors that led to the fall of the Union. Later the US actually frantically tried to get the best weapons back once the Soviets left, but at that point they had been distributed all of the world. A huge colossal failure that absolutely ruined the prestige of the USSR, not to mention plunged Afghanistan into chaos into the present day.
  I'd suggest listening to season 4 of the podcast "Blowback" for a detailed explanation of all this. It's brutal.
- I wonder just how avoidable this was for them. They didn't want to invade, but sometimes in chess you are positioned into making shitty moves by your opponent.

Don't do what Gorbachev did. Do what Deng Xiaoping did.
- and long before that, they should have challenged high-level party members to ensure ideological consistency and thereby weed out opportunists like Khrushchev
  
  "Conscientious practice of self-criticism is still another hallmark distinguishing our Party from all other political parties. As we say, dust will accumulate if a room is not cleaned regularly, our faces will get dirty if they are not washed regularly. Our comrades' minds and our Party's work may also collect dust, and also need sweeping and washing." - Mao Zedong
  
  They should have allowed Stalin to step down when he wanted to. So he could act as a guide and mentor for the next leaders. Instead they worked him to death and then let Khrushchev step in and start fucking everything up.

I know there was personal shortages after the great patriotic war for obvious reasons, but right off the bat there should've been a reimplimentation of purges
I would've also wondered if things would've changed by more rapidly uplifting members of the YCLSU into full party administrative positions commonly held by the old guard would've helped reconnect the gaping wound generation gap caused by the great patriotic war by putting them directly under the the old Bolsheviks as mentorees in addition to lowering the average age of the gerontocracy by decades

If Heydar Aliyev got the top job instead of Gorbachev, the USSR would've still existed to this day. Interesting article on it (Russian).
Aliyev would not have allowed us to lose our country that fast and that easily, and he was a very intelligent politician, just look at Azerbaijan now and Azerbaijan in the early 90s.
For those that don't know, Aliyev was the leader of the Azerbaijan SSR from 1969 to 1982, and afterwards he was a high-ranking member of the politburo, even becoming the First Deputy Premier at one point.

I thought this was a generally good overview. TLDR is that mass privatization was the key driver of the collapse, and this was the key difference between what USSR and China. Soviet leadership ended up buying into western bullshit economics model while China did not. However, even this could've been reversed if the military didn't allow Yeltsin's coup to go on.

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