Russia getting it was somewhat sketchy.
Qatar getting is 100% absolutely ridiculous, and made it clear that FIFA is a complete joke organization.
Russia as a host could be defended, like you said it's not ridiculous as Qatar.
Russia is a country with a serious football history, is large enough to spread the tournament around several large cities, and has never hosted the World Cup, so if you ignore certain obvious problems it would actually look like quite a good choice. Even if you don't ignore those problems it's hardly worse than the choices made for 1934 and 1978.
Qatar, OTOH, is utterly, utterly, ridiculous. North Korea wouldn't have been much worse.
North Korea would have been significant better, while their men's team have a bad reputation (their women team on the other hand do very well), they did qualify the last time. Qatar on the other hand have never succeed in qualifying to the World Cup.
The women's World Cups tends to have different countries doing well. I wonder if this scandal has any effect on the women's World Cup starting in a week.
North Korea had been in every women's World Cup for a while, but was banned for this one
