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I think those three better looking forms of non-democratic governance still seems pretty deficient in the round compared to democracy. As for monarchies, the few remaining strong monarchies seem to mostly be coasting by on oil money, and arguably NK is a monarchy in all but name, and while the PRC and some hybrid regimes seem pretty stable that stability seems pretty transient. Chinese stability especially is pretty recent, and I'm not sure Singapore as a well-placed city state has many lessons to offer other more normal nations. Hungary is I guess doing fine, but hardly better than it's more safely democratic counterparts in Czechia, Poland etc.
Obviously this is a question more complex than a short forum comment, but just on the face of it I don't there's any particular reason to believe any form of non-democratic government produces notably more competent leaders.
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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