I will be up front and frank about this topic: any “history” source that says the Philippines was better under Marcos can be easily ignored because the person who made it doesn’t know what they are talking about. The Marcos era was a brutal authoritarian period which severely restricted people’s rights. But aside from that, the economy was most certainly not good.

The Marcos family in fact stole billions and billions from the government. The Filipino historian Belinda Aquino has documented this situation very well. She also found that the US was heavily involved in helping to keep the Marcos dictatorship in power through monetary and military means. This was part of why growth was slow. Another reason, as is pointed out by Joe Studwell in How Asia Works was that Marcos (and his successors, for that matter) never implemented any kind of land reform. This is important because it means major swathes of the country’s land are still owned by very few people. All of the wealth then is controlled by the few, those landowners from the colonial period generally, rather than it being spread over far more land owners. Effectively, colonialism has continued after its formal end, both in terms of relations with the US and in terms of domestic economics.

For one small example, in the book China Under Mao, we see Andrew Walder present statistics on economic development in China during the Mao period. Walder actually directly compares China’s development to the Philippines’ via a chart. It doesn’t line up directly but Marcos and Mao were in power at the same time for 11 years, so it still does show a lot. They had similar growth, and by that I mean “not very impressive”. Not when compared to Taiwan or Japan, who were true rapidly growing economies in Asia during the 1970s. The Philippines was not a rich country, nor has it ever been a rich country since the colonial period, but for the minority of families that collaborated with American or Spanish colonialism. The last time the Philippines was actually really independently economically important was in precolonial times, where in fact Maynila and Cebu and Sulu (among others) were important parts of the Southeast Asian trade networks. Nowadays, the Philippines’ most important export is...its people. Exporting labor via the OFW system. The economy is buoyed by that system, as the government has made little investment into actual economic development.

The reason the Marcos era is heavily politicized is a totally different issue. The Marcos family was actually never held accountable by successive governments, and in fact they were, again, harbored by the US in exile. The Marcoses are still very powerful and still very influential. Imelda Marcos is still iconic despite literally becoming rich by stealing from the Filipino people. Bongbong Marcos, Ferdinand’s son, is still heavily involved in politics and his popularity is concerning to many. The problem in part also goes to the education system. The government has never really invested in creating a strong education system. As a result, the Philippines’ education system is undoubtedly one of the worst in the world in measures of mathematics, reading, writing, and science (these are in part horrible because they are taught in English generally rather than in the native languages, another aspect of the government being a neocolonial force; favoring English in official government business limits the comprehension of the people). What we see is an education system that has not really aimed to endow people with critical thinking skills. The history education goes right along with this theme, and is also horrible. There are no real curriculums, so teachers can teach history however they want. This has caused a surge in Marcos apologia and frankly the family has become fairly rehabilitated because of this. Social media has also played a major role in popularizing “alternative facts”, as you yourself have discovered. It has had a devastating effect on Philippine democracy and education in fact. So due to most Filipinos not being taught much about precolonial history, about the role of the Americans in oppressing the country since 1899, and then Marcos apologia being rampant in the system and in social media, this topic has become politicized where it really shouldn’t be. Anyone who has gotten a proper education in history will basically say what I am now.