It's the same argument I've heard about the "complexity" of Mastodon: too many choices, which is I guess why people largely stopped going to websites outside the major social networks. Monopoly over competition, it's like everyone is pining for a monarchy.
Democrats aren't authoritarians. It's a bad comparison. Democrats are always fragmented, it's virtually a defining characteristic. Post-Biden unity has been quite unusual.
The fixation is because there is no clear line of succession. If he fails, who steps in? They'll splinter and fragment. They'll still be deplorable, but less effective when not united behind a single authoritarian leader.
I've always called Word documents and PDFs "dead-end formats" (DEF). Once you export your data to them, there's no reliable way to retrieve your data from them for further transformation like you can for YAML, JSON, XML, HTML, Markdown, &c.