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Yes, but if you can manage with that they can easily break the game since they have utopian abondance and meritocraty.
Likewise Xenophobe is the weakest (not by much) because you have to spend more effort wasting resources on diplomacy or defensive wars. The extra base pop growth doesn't make up for the migration penalties, it just lessons the blow making the ethos not as awful as it otherwise would be. The reduced influence cost on expanding isn't that great. Bee-lining to important systems is easy for any ethos, so if you think about it their bonus is effectively just a mining/research station boost and sprawl acceleration.
Pacifist is decent because of the defense bonuses (they have a higher chance of rolling defensive techs, including starbase upgrades), and because trying to actively expand through war is often (not always) a waste of resources compared to spamming habitats or other internal growth options.
What's best for you though is going to be very subjective and depend on your playstyle. If you don't like abusing the AI and diplomacy and would rather just fight, then pacifist and xenophile wont appeal to you much and the cons of xenophobe might just seem like more bonuses. I typically play xenophobe because it's more engaging.
Also a lot depends on the point you are in the game.
Materialist for example is incredibly good late game, but near useless at the start save if you go technocrat.
Spiritualist is always useful, unless you go megacorp where it could potentially hurt, but the lack of robotics hurts you later on. (note you can still tecnically use it, but it's not ideal).
Militarist is quite powerful in general, though you have to lean into the conquering play style.
Pascifist is by far the weakest, with little bonuses that are worth even less with their restrictions.
Xenophobe is great early game, with the livestock being a useful perk to phase out farms, but it generally is more tricky to use than an authoritarian empire.. which is a lot more flexible with efficient economics.
Egalitarian is generally good, though it really shines late game when you can afford their utopian abundance.
I think the best one though, depending on your context, is probably Xenophile. If you go fanatic all of the rather costly influence options can potentially become free.. letting you have 10 defensive pacts with no influence payment. It is however entirely dependent on other empires.. so it's really great or not helpful at all depending.
I'd rank them:
Xenophile 1
Militarist 2
Materialist/Spiritualist Both 3 and 4
Authoritiarian 5
Egalitarian 6
Xenophobe 7
Pascifist 8
But a lot depends on context and what you do with it.
That being said, a xenophobe, egalitarian, pascifist empire is a lot of fun as isolationist, beuracrats, with a syncretic sub species of slaves.
It works really nicely on housing and economics.
No, you just need a government that reduces consumer goods usage, like a fanatic materialist and converting everyone into robots. But you really don't even need that to make the ethic useful.
Having city planets make converting minerals into consumers really easy.
Utopian Abundance in general is a pretty nice choice since the happiness and unemployment benefits are both really nice, it makes it so that clerk jobs are no longer needed and can likely eliminate all potential crime.
Breaking the game aside.
The faction influence and specialist bonus are both also really nice. That's science, unity, consumer goods, and alloys.
It's also great to do if you conquer primitive aliens and they are almost all unemployed.. then you switch on utopian abundance for a crazy amount of unity and consumer goods until you the buildings you want.. so long as you deal with the temporary consumer goods short fall.
However, in general, doing Utopian Abundance out of the gate.. rather than later, is a bad idea.
I mean, if your goto of dealing with habitability with standard empires is sending robots.. then yeah you might run into problems compared to a machine intelligence.
That worked in previous editions, but now you're much better off just finding a reasonable pop to grow through migration treaties.
Personally I find materialists can easilly outdo a machine intelligence in every capacity once they synthetically ascend. Though in fairness that's more of an issue with synthetic ascendacy being too powerful than anything I suppose.
On hiveminds, well, I prefur standard empires so I can't say much for them.. but I will say that Machine intelligences are overrated since people always forget about the intense mineral cost for producing pops.. ontop of energy. Whereas a hivemind only has to use food.
Compare that with machine intelligences for assembly and standard empires using minerals on consumer goods... and a hivemind is quite efficient with its minerals.
Having normal growing pops I always see as superior, but I grab every option I can.
Fanatic Authoritarian doesn't offer a lot better stuff compared to normal authoritarian, so while it's great.. it isn't the best.
I'd say an Authoritarian Fanatic Materialist (technocrat) is great for science, unity, and basically all resources.
Downside is later once you need less worker jobs and more specialist jobs.. and if you go academic instead of caste then authoritarian becomes near useless as an ethic in potential.
Authoritarian/ Spiritualist/ Pascifist is also a really fun economic style, since it's all about having worker jobs.
For example farms used to be able to get both minerals and unity, the minerals doubling on adjacency bonuses and using both resources on tiles, if you were doing pascifist isolationist empires.
Now it's still okay to go isolationist, but it's generally a lot worse off, so hopefully they get some boosts soon.
Authoritarian is worthless without the fanatic part.
It offers way to little.
Fanatic Authoritarian slave guilds offer a massive economy advantage.
But normal Authoritarian offers only 0.5 extra influence and resourses.
Stuff like xenophile and militerist give you good bonuses without the fanatic part.
Same is true for materalist.
Go fanatic of go home.
The basic bonus is just too little to be worth it compaire to the other none fanatic ethic bonuses.
Influence is nice, but there are other things you can get instead, like xenophobe, which will both save you 0.5 influence a month (provided you expand at a ludicrous speed of 1 outpost per 30 months) and increase pop growth (which will beat 4% extra worker output... unless you somehow manage to get like 13 growth).
It's not about bonus, it's about technocracy.
By far the worst ethic, by a distance of several light-years, is Egalitarian. Who in their right mind would take an ethic that penalizes them for, or worse yet, competely bars them from resettling pops, a basic game mechanic that is flat-out MANDATORY for rapidly developing new colonies and, more importantly, managing the inevitable overcrowding that will occur no matter how much you develop your planets. As fully grown pops will no longer automatically migrate to other colonies, resettlement has now become extremely important for making the most of your empire's combined total population growth. Voluntarily restricting this, with how crucial pops are under the current planet mechanics, is simply asinine.
My entire arguement is that you need Fanatic Authoritarian to be on par with ethic's like xenophobe or militerist.
Normal Authoritarian isnt worth anything as other ethic's simply surpass it.
As for Fanatic meterialist:
10% research for Fanatic materalist. 10% research for research grants edict. 10% research for fineshing the discovery tradiation tree and 10% research for the tech perk.
That is 40% research bonus.
Now add to this technocracy giving researcher's unity production and you have an empire that can outtech everyone.
There is no doubt that outside of machine empire technocracy is the most overpowered ethic in stellaris at this time.
One of my builds:
Fanatic materalist xenophile technocracy Mechanist Free Haven dictatorship.
This build will make you have titans while the rest are still using destroyers.
Xenophile give 10% extra trade income, keeps xeno's of your back while you are tech rushing and give you accesss to Xeno-Compatibility which in combination with Free Haven will drown you in workers for your jobs.
And if a planet gets full simply forbid growth.
Honeslty only machine empires are stronger.
When i play Fanatic Authoritarian i do i want to roleplay as a galatic conqueror.
If i accauly want to win i go driven assimilators.
Overpowered is an understatement for driven assimilators.
Or you can have 30% without fanatic one. If you're not into synth ascension, (not)having fanatic version bonuses is not that big of a deal.