In theory, democratic leadership is a good form of leadership because the community decides what rules are made and gets some kind of "representation", the "reasonable iron fist" role comes from the mods, and the community takes an "active role" in participation.
In practice (and KO is no exception), what you practically always end up with is a festering shithole of degeneracy and a tyrannical moderation style that the community themselves promote (hell, they've begged for more trannies on the team even when more than half the team are fucking trannies!) And representation? The last time someone argued on whether "retard" was a slur or not there were massive slapfights and giant essays written on it because God forbid we disregard the opinion of the LGBTWTFBBQ+ community. There's no incentive to clean anything up because the community themselves want wrongthink purged. Most people don't give a fuck about democracy and aren't even involved in the process, which fucks it over even more. And there are so many drama threads started in Meta because the rules are so poorly written and can be used to ban someone who so much as sneezes wrongly in the jannie team's general direction.
Part of democratic leadership is honesty and integrity, so a group of powertripping and authoritarian jannies will inevitably be dishonest. But that's the thing - democratic leadership doesn't work very well when you lie to your community. Knockout jannies have probably lied to their own community more than they've breathed (remember Jim?) and it came back to bite them in the ass way too many goddamn times to count.