I mean, yeah. If you're an autocratic ruler, but almost all your citizens live well, then they won't overthrow you. Hell, they'll even be loyal to you!
Autocracies inevitably collapse because power ends up in hands too selfish, malicious, or incompetent to sustain prosperity. Or external pressures undercut the country's stability. But that'll happen on a larger timescale than Lars currently has to worry about.
Thing is, by and large, power ending up in selfish, malicious, and/or incompetent hands is something of a natural consequence of autocracies. Or rather, because even an autocrat depend on others to actually rule, they need to secure their collaboration, if not their loyalty. Autocrats like super-brainwashers that can scale up forever, or super-AIs with unlimited drone bodies and multitasking aside, no matter how strong the ruler, they need people to actually be their eyes and hands beyond their immediate reach. That's also true for other forms of government, but for autocracies that generally means concentrating power in fewer hands. And, specially for new ones that are lacking in tradition, institutions, and/or inertia, you aren't going to get people loyal the position and the job itself, but people that are good at
getting and keeping power. Generally ambitious, not all that scrupulous, and nothing to say they are actually good at the "using power for the greater good" part of it. And those guys also need their own subordinates, with the same issue as you have. You're going to need to get them to be, if not loyal, at least collaborative towards you.
And for that you're going to need to pay them. Not only credits, but power and favoring their interests. And they do the same for their own. It doesn't really matter if they are competent or not. If they are malicious or not. If they are selfish or not. The autocrat needs to to rule, and, again, specially for new autocracies, they don't have the weight of tradition, inertia, or stronger institutions to do the work for them. Thus, power goes to shitty hands.
Now, the Empire is a bit of different case: Between inheriting a lot of their stuff from the Republic, and Papaltine, at least when he cares to put the effort, being very good at large scale manipulation, they managed institutions a lot stronger than one might have otherwise expected in a very short time. And its size does mean that purging a few problematic high positioned assholes don't break the whole thing. But things are still a mess, with rife with corruption and abuse. And it's not
all Papaltine is an asshole who actually
wants the most suffering and abuse.
Minda though? Minda gets a number of massive advantages: They are small enough that even with lots of delegation, the numbers of people that need to be propitiated are manageable. Being a member of the Empire means they can take at least some advantage of the institutions and the size of the Empire itself, while also remaining small. Or to keep power, so long his superiors are content with him, he has a lot less chance of a coup or otherwise being forcibly removed. And, there's the protagonist-power: Or rather, while he doesn't quite realize it, our protagonist managed direct personal loyalty from a lot of the people he needs to rule. And he lucked out that a lot of the interests both those and the rest of the people he depends to keep on ruling, have are reasonably manageable or within what he'd already be doing.
But even then, he's still having to propitiate people he very much would rather not, such as the Moff, this ISB agent, and more, even at some cost to his society. It's still "within his budget" so to speak, but those are the sort of costs that are higher, by and large, in autocracies, specially new ones.
Also, for a more generalized but more in-depth explanation:
, Well be fun if self insert as Trade Fédération lecture about Rule of aquisition