That "awestruck effect" where you basically switch off your executive function and delegate it to someone else is, I think, a fundamental piece of human psychology that we don't talk about very much. Maybe this just reflects the bias of academia aligns highly with liberalism and individualism, but I don't recall seeing it discussed very much, and certainly not much discussion of why our brains might support that feature.

(Granted, I'm just a lay person, so maybe there's tons of material on this I simply haven't seen.)

Here's a simple hypothesis:

Obviously, in many cases not delegating your executive function is a good thing. The others around you might not have your best interests at heart, and people that were too easily subjugated may have found that their subjugator took all of the nearby potential mates and left them none. So we'd expect people to naturally try to take care of themselves, and evolve a tendency to do that.

At the same time, many things in the lives of our ancestors were not zero-sum and cooperation is mightily effective at increasing the fitness of all members of the group. However, coordinating that cooperation itself takes resources, as anyone who's been stuck in a committee knows. Actually getting a big group of people who are fighting for their own rational self-interest to agree and align is really expensive.

So maybe this brain feature is a sort of hack to short-circuit committee hell and let us operate efficiently as a group without all of the back-and-forth needed among a collection of rational actors. It's a way for us to form a sort of human Voltron quickly and give control to one person. If that person really does have the best interests of the entire group at heart, that can be a win for all participants.

Of course, you take on a huge risk when you do this. Delegate your executive function to the wrong charismatic leader and you get, literally, the Holocaust. It's unsurprising therefore that we don't always do this, and that there seems to be wide variation among people in how susceptible they are to being a delegatee, and how skilled they are at persuading people to delegate to them.

It may even be a net win to support this feature when some of the participants invididually lose out. There's a lot of research into the evolutionary basis of altruism and it seems like the two aren't incompatible. It may be that among our long lost ancestors, tribes whose leader could whip the members into a fury to the point where some knowingly battled to the death survived better and passed on more of their genes (which were likely shared across many related members of the tribe) than those that were more individualistic and egalitarian.

The rate that humans are willing to be drawn into a charismatic leader, versus being critical of them may reflect the rate that doing so is a winning game on aggregate.