When speaking in terms of populations, "better" is generally used in terms of outcome, i.e. the sense of "increasing odds of survival". Quality of life and survivability tend to align, but in the cases where they don't, evolution will obviously tend to select for the latter.

I think part of the overarching problem is that there's a tendency by some to frame the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture as some sort of choice, when really the move has been pretty solidly dictated by circumstance. Expanding population drove the development of farming and became a feedback loop with it. The only way to "choose" to remain a hunter-gatherer society would be to either forbid farming, or to impose an artificial limit on population, neither of which are really possible in a decentralized tribal society.