I think quite a bit of this is that if you’re not in the out group, being in an autocracy would feel like it has a lot of benefits with few drawbacks. About a decade ago I was speaking to a man in Haiti who lamented the fall of the Duvalier and Aristide regimes. From his perspective (since he nor his family members were targets) it was stable versus what had come since via democracy such as the UN “peacekeeping” forces (and it’s obviously gotten much worse since then). At one point he said “Yes people died but at least they picked up the trash.”

None of this is an endorsement on my part. It seems clear to me that democracies are better than autocracies, but there are appealing parts of autocracies if you are willing to turn a blind eye to the atrocities.