> This is the core flaw of the democratic system. Once a person gets elected, democracy effectively ends.

That's an intentional feature of representative democracy, not a bug. Letting voters micromanage every individual decision would be direct democracy.

> there is no punishment mechanism

In the next election voters can and will exact a punishment if they don't like the direction things are going. Politicians live in constant fear of this.

It is true that term limits reduce the effect of this threat somewhat, but in a system with shared governance not everyone gets term limited at the same time so there's still a strong collective effect. The issue in this case is just that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of one term limited person; the executive branch was not designed to wield this much unilateral power over domestic policy.