Yes some of them were bad, but the illusion of consent democratic governments can create is IMO even worse when they go bad.
This is not what democracy is. Democracy is mainly about one thing: Being able to remove people from office you dislike.
As soon as you get a dictator, benevolent or not, you cease the power to remove them, their heirs or sucessors from office without civil war and/or revolution.
This is why dictatorships will always have a sense of insecurity, because on top of not being able to rely on a fair system of law, you are not even able to rely on the character of the dictatorship. Even a single dictator might change their style drastically throughout their career etc.
So if you wish for that, you probably didn't read a lot of history.
This is absurd and wrong on its face if you take the word “democracy” even a little literally, which you should even if only for the theoretical exercise. Democracy roughly means that the people govern. But now you’ve said that it is “mainly” about removing someone else from governance. Huh? Something doesn’t seem right here.
This is of course “representative democracy”, or roughly “elite(-driven) democracy”; a sort of governance where the elites jocky for power (as per usual), present to the rest of the population who they may vote for (every two years or so), and then the general population goes back to their private (non-political) affairs.
And this according to some people is something that we are supposed to be grateful for. What a sham.