My experience in the UK was a small 3x5 notecard sized piece of paper with my choices for local member of parliament. I marked the box by the person I wanted to elect, and submitted the vote.
I still joke that the USA has "too much" democracy ;)
But, like other things the USA does differently to the rest of the world, a great many of its people just haven't experienced anything different to compare their experience.
The point is that there is no executive, no dictator, appointed by the people. It all goes to either a council or legislature appointment. And as long as you do such elections locally enough that those representatives aren't just ivory tower detached from those they govern their failures will be reflected throughout the community.
A large part of why it is so easy to mislead voters today with ads and propaganda is that you aren't voting for people you know, you are voting for strangers from a distant land, and to them you are just a statistic.
No, the reason reformers made these changes was to break up rampant corruption and back-room dealing in State government and the allocation of appointed positions.
Who is telling you this? This runs contrary to decades of research findings (however distasteful some might find that).
You can't ask your average citizen to spend 20+ hours in advance of an election thoroughly researching candidates, and you can't trust a third party to "condense" information on them without an agenda.
A republic is supposed to be a society where people elect representatives to make most of these decisions for them. I should not be directly electing judges, police chiefs, school officials, attorney generals, or cabinet positions of the state government. The only reason TPTB made these elections direct was to incentivize people to vote by party color rather than by person to smuggle in bad actors into government.
I'm a firm believer that instead of having at least 5+ different elections each cycle we should be electing a ranked choice set of 3+ representatives per district who then can, as their job, and by legislature appoint the rest of the offices of government.
That would mean I would ranked choice vote for ~3 representatives that then convene in my state legislature. That legislature sends some number of its own delegates to Washington to act as federal representatives. The 3 representatives in my district would, for my district, select its judges, police chiefs, etc.
That would hugely dissociate the machine that overwhelms people with choice and results in aligning with factions and talking points instead of actual people.