I feel like people have been conditioned to get an irrational hatred when they hear the word "buyback" as if it were some evil trick pulled by those evil banksters over in wallstreet. "buybacks are killing capitalism" blah blah. Its pure FUD that comes from finance being complex and the average person not being nearly informed enough about it to parse it correctly.
Buybacks and dividends both are ways of returning capital to shareholders. Dividends do it directly, buybacks do it by raising the share price.
Example: Company makes 100$ profit and is worth 1000$ @ 1$/unit. You own 100 units of stock. Lets say it pays out everything to shareholders every year, once a year, at the end. It can pay this as a dividend, so you would get 10$ at the end of the year, for a total of 110$.
Or it can do buybacks, and buys 100$ worth of units, effectively removing them for existence, and lowering the total number of units to 900. The company still makes 100$ though, and to keep the same ratio of price to earnings, 10 (=1$*1000units/100$), the price of each unit needs to rise to 1.111$, making your shares worth 111$.
As you can see, they are pretty much identical, both giving 10% returns, except dividends are taxed much harder so buybacks win. The buyback shares are worth 1$ more, because this is a simplified example and I don't account for compounding, and you would have to continuously collect dividends and reinvest them continuously to get the same result(111$), which more closely approximates what happens in reality.
Dividends are just traditional, buybacks are just another way to do the same thing. Your "dividend" is the share price increasing over the course of the year.