I know things were really bad in 1989, but what made it so bad that people in so many socialist countries just rose up and overthrew their own governments?
Look up how color revolutions work.
So, similar to the more recent Arab Spring in the early 2010s?
Yes. The tools and methods used were different back then because things like social media weren’t available and imperialist intelligence cutouts calling themselves NGOs didn’t permeate socialist countries to anywhere near the degree they did and still do in the countries targeted by the Arab Spring operation or in other recent victims of (successful or attempted) color revolutions like Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but the essential characteristics are the same.
Incidentally, the much discussed Tiananmen square incident basically followed more or less the same playbook as was pulled in Eastern Europe around the same time, and the main reason why it failed in China despite having succeeded everywhere else is because the CPC had not degenerated to the same level of demoralization, confusion and revisionism as the ruling communist parties of Eastern Europe had in the wake of Perestroika.
Ironically this may have been due to the Sino-Soviet split which led China to pursue a more independent path and as a result was able to resist following the CPSU down the fatally erroneous path it took under Gorbachev. The CPC managed to outmaneuver the imperialists and defeat their plot and that is why the West is still so butthurt about that incident to this day. It is even more of a sore spot for them because having failed in flipping China they were also unable to destroy the DPRK since they could not fully surround them.
