I'm honestly in the camp that democracy has pretty much failed California.
I sympathize with the few Californians who had lost their livelihoods and did everything that they can to assist their communities, and voted for more water to be pumped and better environmental conservation to prevent wildfires. However, people need to vote in governments who are competent, and not just because they have a (D) at the end of their name. Majority of Californians have kept Gavin Newsom even after he mocked the state during quarantine by having a party at the French Laundry. I found it much difficulty sympathizing with them because I'm beholden by the idea "you deserve what you voted for." It's also to note that California is ruled by a "tyranny of the majority," a big flaw of democracy, where majority of the residents of Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego are hive-minded, yet have much more power in the government than Californian folks in the state's Central Valley.
It is obvious that California has many issues that cannot be solved by just voting them out because corruption heavily influences the voting process, such as the use of mail-in voting. The majority of California elected a government that did nothing but enlarged homeless camps, practically legalized crime (to the point San Francisco's most famous shopping mall is shutting down due to endless robberies), destroyed the sanitary systems, increased cost of living, decreased quality of life, and destroyed their demographics (only point where Republicans are to blame because Reagan). And in the end, majority of Californians have amassed a large amount of cognitive dissonance that they should just keep voting D just to keep California as a beacon of tolerance and will ignore all the problems you mention to them.
Now that the problems are pointed out, what are the solutions? The most obvious one, democracy, just doesn't work. Even though it makes me a hypocrite and dumb, I honestly think the federal government implementing "authoritarian" measures is the only way to fix the state. Turn California into a territory, arrest all the corrupt bureaucrats, shut down the state's democratic process and clean it up, declare martial law based on the multiple emergencies that is wildfires, homelessness, crime, and mass migration, appoint mayors and governors, and/or have the feds rebuild California from the ground up by building up an effective irrigation system and cutting down dead tress. The most worst they can do is become the same thing as the Californian state government. Shit's unconstitutional as fuck, and you can already see the cracks of the dangers of feds lusting for more power, but what else is there to do?
To top it off, with direct authoritarianism from the federal government, you don't have to blame Californians if California goes to shit again.
