It was obvious that he thought that every legal permanent resident in America should be eligible, but that his political staff convinced him to say "citizens" for the same reason you cite that changed to "freedom dividend".

I guarantee you there were multiple people on the staff who said, correctly, something along the lines of "dude if you don't limit this to citizens we'll spend the rest of your campaign fighting skirmishes over guest worker programs and we'll never be able to talk about anything else ever again." I don't see how you could really begin to grapple with UBI/SSA4All/whatever until you'd revamped immigration. And I don't think Andrew Yang has many strong opinions about immigration.

Personally, "freedom" aside, I think calling it a dividend is not just smart but semantically correct,

I think you grab the low-hanging Obamacare. "Dividend" is a painfully wonky word that nobody poor is going to understand. Meanwhile I have a buddy who is doing his level best to stay above water until he can start collecting social security. Sure, it's a "dividend" but it's also "security" in that it can't be fucking taken away. As it is now, we provide "security" to the employment underclass on the threat that they fucking well better never try entering the workforce ever fucking again, which is the dumbest possible strategy. Dividends? Those vary from year to year and you might not get one. "Social Security?" We've got six generations of grandparents who have made that work.

I think the moment I became a Yang convert was when he cited the stat that more people are currently on disability than are actively looking for jobs (obviously not true anymore! but it will be again soon), then went on to try to say something smart about how to address that.

In the book, he states that there are more people collecting disability than work in construction.