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Notes -
Morocco and Malaysia are fairly strong monarchies doing better than average for the region and generally on the upswing for mostly non-oil related reasons. Liechtenstein is also a strong monarchy that’s carved out a pretty good niche for itself, although obvious micro state caveat. Jordan doesn’t seem like it’s notable for improvement recently, but it’s weathered recent challenges admirably well.
I agree that it’s difficult to cast hybrid regimes as obviously better than democracies, but it’s also difficult to cast them as obviously worse. Part of this is probably boundary effects and if we want to have a real discussion(obviously this thread is the wrong place for that as you yourself note) we should preregister what we consider a hybrid regime versus a democracy that’s simply corrupt(Ukraine) or dominated by one party(Japan) or both(Mexico).
As far as oligarchies are concerned I’d point to China and Rwanda as strong examples of countries that improved recently and notably after switching to oligarchic governance even if that oligarchy may not be my cup of tea. I might point to Kazakhstan as a weaker example, too. In any case this really is a topic that deserves its own top level comment if we wanted to get in depth, but my broader point was that there’s lots of different non-democratic systems and not all of them have a blatantly one sided comparison to democracy.
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