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I live in Malaysia, my wife's family is a good study in that roughly half of her uncles and aunties are Singaporean and the other half are Malaysian Chinese. In my experience, the Malaysian family is first-language Chinese with passable English and Malay plus some dialect (albeit essentially a sliding scale of dialect versus English with each ensuing generation). The Singaporean family is about the same at the generation of my wife's parents, though for context they were about 18-19 at the time of Singapore leaving the federation and the younger generations are 90% English with some spoken Chinese but functionally illiterate.
According to them, the main difference is that in Malaysia the schooling system allows for private schools to be conducted in Chinese which is the only practical way to get literate in Chinese since even the majority of ethnic Chinese Malaysians will be functionally illiterate in Chinese characters. Also there's been a pretty large divergence between Malaysian Chinese (Largely spun off of southern Hokkien/Teochew/Cantonese/Hakka speakers who have remained in touch with mainland trends via the cultural sinosphere) and Mainland-Chinese, even when speaking Mandarin. Malay's an afterthought used for interacting with the government as it's essentially been replaced as lingua franca in Malaysia by English for anybody under the age of 30.
My wife's grandmother is in her mid 70s, she's illiterate despite being a fairly successful small business owner who's since retired to be a landlady and only speaks Hokkien (Possibly Malay but there's also a cultural distaste amongst Chinese when it comes to speaking the language outside of purely utilitarian purposes). Yet understands spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and Malay. Cantonese since it was dominant culturally in entertainment for a few decades, Mandarin though it only really entered Malaysia by the time she was middle-aged and Malay since one must occasionally acknowledge the landlords.
I wouldn't say that the language differences between Malaysia and the Mainland are that great, certainly not compared to the variation within China itself. You could find plenty of grandmother-granddaughter pairs from Fujian (and more from Taiwan, while we're at it) that would sound about the same, as their ancestors all spoke Hokkien. Perhaps the youngest and most highly educated generation of Mainlanders are converging on a Beijing accent regardless of hometown, but such a change has only just begun and will take decades or perhaps centuries to complete.
They're definitely mutually intelligible but I hear a lot of comments from Malaysian Mandarin speakers that they find Mainlanders tricky to understand/phrasing things differently and vice-versa. Part of it's the Malaysian chinese vocabulary picking up a lot of loanwords from English/Malay/dialect
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