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It depends what you mean by "better". A lot of older black folks look back on it wistfully given the current state of the country (I've had them joke to me about asking if they can vote for de Klerk), but for young black south africans the general attitude is that opportunity for aspiration is worth the price.
The real problem with apartheid is just that it didn't work very well. It was a bureaucratic mess dominated by a small group of hardline Afrikaner Calvinists who wished they could repress whites as much as they repressed blacks. The army was stronger than Rhodesia's in terms of size and equipment, but far less well-run and well-led. The "deep state" acted with complete lawlessness, dabbling in everything from illegal medical experiments to rhino poaching. The government blocked the introduction of TV until 1976, in large part for religious reasons. The system's fundamental contradiction between the desire for separation and the need for cheap black labour created a class of displaced single male labourers who would then become the foundation of modern townships. The racial classifications in mixed cities made no sense - Japanese were white, Chinese were coloured, Muslims were coloured unless they were Turks, in which case they were white, and god help you if some bureaucrat decided to screw with your classification. Generally, things ran on Kafka's playbook with a side of hypocrisy.
Now, could apartheid have worked if it had been set up properly from the beginning by some visionary genius and run efficiently? Yes, I suspect so, given the example of Rhodesia only folding to external pressure, or the possibility of simply jettisoning the "bantustans" as genuinely separate countries (though once SA was addicted to cheap labour, that became impossible). Did apartheid deliver many extremely valuable things, like basic safety, that SA no longer does? Largely yes. Could actually existing apartheid have survived, even without sanctions, without ending up collapsing into a race war? Only, in the long run, by becoming a genuinely totalitarian police state with all that implied - and, ultimately, that would have been a sad fate for a country founded by some of Europe's most freedom-loving children.
Yes, I’d definitely gotten the impression of apartheid being a corrupt mess running off of cheap labor and limited central control of the state apparatus, which didn’t work as well as it’s thought to have. It’s nice to have that confirmed.
What I’d never heard was the description of it as being fundamentally bureaucratically arbitrary; most people who described living under the system- including one who was half Lebanese and I would have expected to suffer from bureaucratic probes into his racial classification- described the oppressive aspects as being aimed at other people- either blacks or dissident whites who couldn’t keep their heads down. I’m totally willing to believe it could be a problem for some people, though.
And BTW ‘Japanese are white but Chinese are colored’ and ‘Muslims are colored unless they’re Turks’ just seem like common sense to me, although I suppose that’s not the extent of racial arbitrariness.
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