It also says something about Stalin's highest placed lackeys that he was still the best among them. Would I prefer having a sexual predator who raped women running a country or a bloodthirsty mass murderer who had people executed, sent dissidents to insane asylums, came close to starting a nuclear war and ruined the entire economy? I'll take the first. He's certainly the lesser of two evils. If he murdered a dozen of his victims or so he still stands out as the lesser evil. From the standpoint of the health of the hundreds of millions of people, is it an acceptable tradeoff to allow maybe 100 women to be raped and 20 to be killed if it means that hundreds of thousands or millions don't die of starvation, aren't shot summarily, aren't forced to live in abject poverty? Yes, sadly, that's an acceptable tradeoff. It's not an enviable decision to have to make in the first place, but if those are the choices, I think the overwhelming majority of people would have picked Beria.
We can not undo the past, only learn from it.
Us wanting to go back into time and changed one small detail and thus change history is a form of wishcasting. It is not the more cold cognitive part of our brain but instead comes from our more emotional mammalian part of the brain that finds the present or the past unsatisfactory. Now once initiated our cold cognitive part of our brain may tell the rest of the story, but the muse is always our more instinctual Id part of the brain wishcasting and thus directing this hypothetical alternate world.
What happen with the Soviet Union and thus the world is a horror. Stalin and the decades afterwards is a horror.
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I do not trust alternate histories saying if X lived, such as Beria, the world would be better. It is inherently unfalsiable and thus unscientific. Instead we are merely using the narrative part of the brain. But remember I said this narration starts due to wishcasting and ones own Id and thus we are not really predicting with an alternate future, we are just play acting.
If Beria is a sexual predator I can tell you he is unvirtuous. Of course he can be 100x more competent than Khrushchev but once this alternative history branch starts diverging from our main timeline, there will be new problems Beria will have to handle and I do not trust his ability to handle them if he is not in control of his appetites and he sees part of humanity as disposable people.
Of course it is likely Beria > Khrushchev but we will just be in a different horror movie than the one our world actually lived. Seriously almost anyone could do better than Khrushchev for the USSR was such a mess and it did a wonderful job of killing its own people and other people due to mismanagement but also due to wicked will in order to preserve their power during this time of its existence.
