The thing with feudal Tibet was that the monks didn't actually interfere with the average Tibetan's life too much. Unlike authoritarian China, dissenters in Tibet were by and large tolerated. For example, the newspaper Tibet Mirror was widely circulated in Tibet before the Chinese invasion, particularly among the ruling clerical strata, despite propagating Christian ideas and calling for political reform. That stopped very quickly after 1950.

I don't think comparing 1950 feudal Tibet to modern day Tibet under Chinese rule is entirely fair. The assumption being that an independent Tibet wouldn't have changed at all in the last 70 years.