Does anyone actually want democracy for its own sake?

Rather than, as being a way of bringing about a way of running society which is seen as least damaging and most likely to bring about the best life for most people.

And since pure democracy is pretty difficult to operate on a large scale, we get the compromise of various forms of representative democracy, some of which are not very representative, and not very democratic.

The most efficient form of tyranny would be a populist democratic tyranny.