Several years ago I helped cofound a worker owned for-profit software and design cooperative. Its constitution was formulated around a mix of product incubation and consulting in support of labour solidarity through cultivation of progressively more interesting/motivating/challenging work. It was founded after we had all quit our high-performing and very profitable agency whose non-technical/non-creative ownership cut one too many corners on the sustainable systems that we were working on. Typical anti-flow type management decisions with arbitrary deadlines, death marches, and silly promises to clients despite solid contracts (which I had written and negotiated directly with the clients and our lawyers).
In the new co-op that us engineers and designers from the old company formed, there was growth early on, and a plan to expand to new cities/markets because the cost structure was horizontally scalable by design. This was before boutique remote app studios and incubators became commonplace (at least before all the really big agencies tried to get in on it, e.g. Sid Lee, Ogilvy).
Lo and behold, it turned out there were just barely enough members who wanted to take a more employee/entitlement oriented tack (as opposed to entrepreneurial) vs the other half. These members were of the same local cultural and linguistic background (the socially dominant one), whereas the rest of us were from all over. The locals formed a "cabal" of sorts and pushed for spending lots of money on a swanky office, vetoed horizontal expansion and denied the right to work for one of the members who had just moved to a new city as part of the previous plan (by voting to refuse to allocate some of our mandated work to him).
The original vision fell apart and was replaced by something more parochial. The more "ambitious" cofounders all left and the co-op continues to thrive in its own way today but as a shadow of the dream we had in the beginning.
An autocracy would not have endured these trials so early on. In top-down mode, the boss gets to enforce focus. Certainly not good if the dictator is not benevolent, but the experience provided for a lot of reflection on governance.
Reminds me of this explainer video I saw recently from CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=344s
No matter the exact loci of power, there are always gradients between the points, and forces that can bring imbalance are very hard (perhaps undesirable) to control.