Tibet before the Chinese occupation did have many problems. But it was also a society that was in the process of change.

It can be misleading to call it a feudal society because it was different from feudalism in China or the West. In many ways it was more like a society with many social classes than a feudal society. For one thing, much of the population of Tibet was nomadic. You can’t really have a feudal society of nomads.

Also many peasants owned their own land. There was no famine. Tibet experienced its first famine after the Chinese occupation.

The wikipedia article Serfdom in Tibet controversy may help. Also this article here is well worth a read: China's claim that "Old Tibet" was a feudal serfdom is fiction

Yes, there was judicial amputation in Tibet in the nineteenth century. However, this had already ceased before the Chinese occupation.

The other side of this, which the Chinese don’t mention, is that Tibet banned capital punishment in 1915, well before most other countries. To this day capital punishment is still permitted in several countries world wide including the US, and for that matter China as well. So in some ways Tibet was even ahead of its times.

I think the main criticism others have of the policies of the Chinese government in Tibet is that Tibet needs to find its own path, just as Bhutan did. The Chinese had and still have little understanding of the Tibetan situation, and Tibetan culture and beliefs. This is not a good basis for administering Tibet because they frequently try to impose changes on Tibet based on their experiences in China. For instance forcefully housing nomads.

Bhutan is an example of a Tibetan style Buddhist country that has found its own direction. It has a low GDP so you can point to that and say that its policies aren't working - but it is noted because of its policy of Gross national happiness which seems to work for this country at least, see this map of Subjective Well Being. Notice how Bhutan is a dark red blob to the right of India, one of the happiest countries in the world, scores higher than the UK, and much higher than China or Tibet, though its GDP is very low.

Tibet too might find its own way of developing if given the autonomy to direct its development. The Dalai Lama is interested in communism, and finds quite a few points of contact between communism and Buddhism. See 'I'm a Marxist,' Dalai Lama tells Chinese students and Marxism and religion

Tibet need not be a democracy such as Bhutan. Who can say, Tibet might even become a Buddhist communist country. It would be interesting to see how that developed given some of the connections between Buddhism and Marxism.

But it needs to find its own path.

Also - the analogy that is often made between the Dalai Lama and the Pope is misleading - there is no spiritual head of Buddhism, because the Buddha himself , in the speech he made soon before he died explicitly warned his followers not to take anyone else as a spiritual leader after him. He said they should take the teachings as their guide instead.

So though there are many Buddhist teachers, the student chooses his teacher, and the Dalai Lama is only a teacher in this sense for his own personal students. He is not even a religious head of his own particular school of Tibetan Buddhism in this sense. He is often asked why he doesn’t tell Tibetans in Tibet what to do. His questioners I think expect him to issue proclamations on Tibetan Buddhism like a Pope does on Catholicism. But that is something that no Buddhist spiritual teacher can do, at least if they follow the main sutra traditions based on the very extensive teachings of the Buddha in the Buddhist canon. If they were to try they’d be rightly ignored. So he rightly refuses all such requests. There would be no point anyway as he would just be ignored if he attempted something like that. It’s just not how Buddhists think about spiritual teachers, even one as inspiring as the Dalai Lama.

He was a political leader, until he resigned that role, which he did recently. But he was never a religious leader in this sense, as there are no religious leaders in this sense in Buddhism.

So, the structure of catholic Christianity is very different from that of any of the Buddhist traditions, and comparisons like this are likely to lead you astray. He was not therefore a theocratic leader in the Christian sense. Indeed if you mean theocratic in the sense of ruling in the name of a god - he isn’t a god and isn’t thought of as the mouthpiece of a god either.

When they talk about him as a “god king” they mean that they think of him as an instance of Chenrezig, the so called “deity of compassion”. But this is not a god in the Western sense at all. Because anyone who shows compassion is thought of as Chenrezig. If you do something compassionate, something selfless that helps others, in that moment you will be Chenrezig. That’s basically what the word means.

The Tibetan idea of Chenrezig as you see it in paintings of Tankas etc is much more like a poem or beautiful image, a way of giving rise to an inspiration of compassion. It’s done like that because when you really enter into compassionate activity - it’s like somethign other than yourself, an inspiration far wider than yourself. It’s not some external being, it’s a quality and capability we all have in ourselves, or at least that’s how Buddhists think of it. But it is so much vaster than the narrow way we normally think of our lives, and that’s what they try to convey in these images, which is why compassion is often shown as a deity. But it’s not in the Western sense. It’s just a way of showing the inspiration of pure compassion, in human form.

So - no-one can rule “in the name of Chenrezig” unless you just mean, be a compassionate ruler. It’s not like an external being you could claim to have special communication with, to talk to, or to know what it is he wants, or anything like that. So in short it has pretty much none of the connotations of Western theocracy and I think calling him a “god king” though it may be literally correct, is very misleading.

So - I’d actually say he never was theocratic in the sense that e.g. the Pope is.

As for political power, he has given up all his political powers now, resigned from the position. He did that a few years back. If he wanted power, why would he do that? No sign at all that he is someone who is personally interested in political power or controlling people.