You're not rude. It's a unpleasant position to endorse. Excuse curtness of my writing and lax structure, in hurry. TLDR is poor autocrats can make a country rich and democratic fast. The vice versa isn't true, poor democratic countries have historically stayed poor. You are fixating on "bad" autocratic regimes, there are benevolent and benign ones as well - hence notion of benevolent dictatorship. There are proven success stories this century from spectrum of autocracy that has succeeded in rapid development which sets up condition for transition into democracies. Some/lots of eggs broken in process, but moral calculus still comes out "on top" - the winner is broader society and future generations. Key point is fast / rapid / expedient.

First, a comparison of infant mortality using 2019 data:

India population: 1353M

Birth rate: 18 per 1000 people

Infant mortality: 28/1000 births

Infant mortality: ~736000

China population: 1393M

Birth rate: 10 per 1000 people

Infant mortality: 7/1000 births

Infant mortality: ~97000

That's the moral calculus once you look past platitudes of slow democratic development from poor countries that start at the bottom. Infant mortality is just _one_ cost of retarding development in terms of avoidable / excess deaths. India had substantially worse child mortality and higher birth rate 20 years ago relative to China (authoritarian family planning perk), the improvement is steady but glacial. Poverty translates to hundreds of millions of avoidable deaths as function of slow development / poverty alleviation rate since Indian democratic experiment began postwar. That is the cost of being poor and democratic. Persistent poverty and deprivation ripples through generations and has mortality comparable to total war - compare military vs famine + disease (poverty) related WW2 fatalities, when both data points is available, poverty consistently comes out worse. Addressing poverty rapidly trumps all other moral considerations. Poverty will outlasts bad dictators but is avoidable under good ones. Repression is short term, gains compound long term. Short term because even living generations can enjoy fruits by very nature of developing rapidly. Korea/Taiwan remember growing up under dictators. Singapore/China remembers how shit postwar struggles were.

Indian democracy is eeking out 1/5th of China's GDP despite having comparable starting position and much better external conditions for development - CCP was sanctioned and hamstrung by western bloc for decades postwar. India's slow / dysfunctional and now more and more illiberal democracy had more unfettered opportunities, but is just not effective relative to proven authoritarian models. Which leads us to Japan who developed under authoritarian prewar government. Their Manchukuo model is copied by Asian Tigers. They are the poster child for rapid modern development jump started by authoritarianism. Postwar Japan was in the same position as other destroyed postwar countries, the institutions setup by authoritarian legacy enabled transitioning back into previously developed conditions when US funded reconstruction. There is continuity in state capabilities due to institution memory embodied in human capital initially cultivated by authoritarian direction [0]. Again, starting autocratic doesn't mean staying autocratic. Different systems are effective for different stages of development. Inefficiency is total deaths under curve for time to develop to wealth level necessary to mitigate effects of poverty. This is an incredible number of lives over multi-generational time scale.

Manchukuo = Manchuria, the amount of Japanese atrocities there was incredible, but subsequent SKorean / Taiwan dictatorships managed to replicate Japanese model with comparably less atrocities. Which circle back to spectrum of authoritarianism, from relatively benevolent (Singapore) to benign available to make this model work. India democracy could still succeed, if it does, it will take longer, the interest rate is millions of avoidable deaths. That's what gets hand waved when people fixate only on good democracies and bad autocracies instead of the entire spectrum. Another personal handwave... the moral costs of starting authoritarian is cheap. It's better population to have 5/10/15 of bad time now in exchange for generational prosperity. India "democracy" is kind of devolving into a shitshow, they seem to be hurtling towards the worst of both worlds.

[0] Re: human capital, I poorly articulated my point. I really mean state coordinated institutions that makes running a modern developed country possible. It's easy to train a bunch of scientists, engineers etc, but you need competent state to coordinate moving parts into something productive. OECD democracies are standing on foundations built by exploitive / authoritarian pasts. Hence my emphasis on modern India as an experiment on "total" development based off democracy. They started from close to zero and after 60 years, coordination is not there and the system is floundering on the precipitate of significant demographic, technologic deadlines. The system is not producing the results. Ultimate question is if it's a matter of "if" or "when". If not then democracy will have doomed 1.4B indians -> 1.6B by 2050.