Yes, dramatically better. I grew up in Soviet Union, but I’ve been living here in Montenegro for many years already, and I have friends who remember life in SFRJ. That’s how I can compare things.
"By 1988 emigrant remittances to Yugoslavia totaled over $4.5 billion (USD), and by 1989 remittances were $6.2 billion (USD), which amounted to over 19% of the world's total. A large portion of those remittances came from Yugoslav professional and skilled workers employed by Yugoslav engineering and construction firms with contracts abroad, including large infrastructure projects in the Middle East, Africa and Europe."[1]
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/yugoslav-guest-workers-torn-between-ge...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...
This is misleading. It was not a totalitarian state.
Benevolent dictatorship is even an exaggeration.
Yugoslavia had a very liberal socialist economy. Trade with the west was very common. International travel was allowed. Collectivism was common but it’s misleading to suggest this is an element of totalitarianism. Strikes were more legal in communist Yugoslavia than they are in present-day United States. Control over the media is accurate.
It’s off topic but citizens also had free access to healthcare.
It most definitely was, without any doubt. However, it was achieved not by physical force like in most other cases, but by management of ideological education and control of all aspects of life, carefully choosing what will be allowed and how. This control was very subtle and by necessity needed to be carefully adapted with time, but without it the country would have fallen apart much sooner than it actually did, with catastrophic consequences.
Everything you write is exactly the result of this information control, and is what things seemed like at the surface.