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I wouldn't say mods are unelected. Readers basically vote by visiting the subreddit they mod. If a bunch of mods become too much of a problem, you can just "leave the country". If enough people leave, those mods will just be dictators of an empty subreddit.

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You can't "leave the country" for the large default subs. That kind of argument doesn't scale well into the millions+ subs where even if every mods on that board being a dick to 2-3 people a day, they would still need years to make the current population of user to get noticeably affected. And because they are basically the default subs, their new users make up for whoever is leaving anyway.

The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.

What presumably scales well with subreddit size is the amount of spam and abuse moderators have to deal with. So if, on a million+ sub, they manage to only "be a dick to 2-3 people a day", and the subreddit otherwise isn't rapidly bleeding users due to an onslaught of trolls and spammers - I'd say the mods are doing a goddamn great job. It's not like bad actors keep themselves away.

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