[Wintereise]

Anecdotal, but I've never seen democracy work out well for architecture level decision making.

If there's someone with a proven track record of making sound decisions at the required level, often the team benefits from just following their lead.

Obviously, this can't be another case of the 4x engineer making everyone else 0.4x engineers. Fairly situational indeed.

[JohnBooty]

I used the word "democracy" myself, but I probably should have used a different word.

I would agree that it certainly shouldn't be a "one person, one vote" style democracy that makes everybody exactly equal regardless of talent, dedication, experience, domain knowledge, etc!