I’ve come around to the belief that the biggest benefit of democracy is not choosing the best and wisest leaders.

The benefit is the regular ability to remove bad leaders. It doesn’t always happen as fast as we want but it happens eventually.

It’s not perfect, but imagine your least favorite president instead presiding for decades until death or coup.

The purpose of a system is what it does. There's lots of literature on what the best, or at least better, voting systems (hello preference voting) and decision making approaches are. Getting them implemented is another story.