If a totalitarian regime is not better than a democracy, then why is China outpacing the western world by every meaningful metric? Why are more and more governments increasingly shifting to the totalitarian side of the spectrum?

I think it's pretty obvious by now that individuals' feelings of being 'free' are not relevant to the big picture of what nation states seek to achieve. If you tasked an AI with controlling a country to achieve arbitrary goals, you can be damn sure it would be totalitarian for maximum efficiency.

I don't support or condone totalitarian governments and I value my freedoms, however illusionary they may be. But I have no delusions about what the optimal governance structure is.