In a two-party system that gentlemanly good faith eventually breaks down and you end up with our current problem, where you need supermajority control of all branches of government to actually do anything, because if you lack even one single point of control then party-line behavior will allow everything to be ground to a halt.
Parliamentary systems are better, there is just one house in most cases, and the executive is of the same party as the legislature, so when a government forms it has consensus and can execute policy. Yes, this is less checked-and-balanced, and that's a good thing, because accomplishing policy and checks and balances are opposing goals. Too much checks and balance and nothing gets done. If everything is fine that's great, but our system has been deadlocked for 20 years now, things are not great, and nothing can be done about it.
And there are still an executive and judicial branches in a parliamentary system, it is still a federal system, just not the American federal system.
The real "checks and balances" is ultimately voting. Having snap elections allows that check to be manifested much more readily when the government begins to go off the rails of public opinion.
(the queen is actually a very interesting apparatus in the british government... apart from having some kind of maximum duration between elections, you are dependent on someone to decide when to call a snap election. Obviously you can't really rely on a government that is completely off the rails to call an election on itself, and party line voting poses obvious problems. So how do you deal with it? An oracle machine (in the crypto sense) that exists outside the system and can operate independently to decide when to call an election. Which is what the queen does, she can dissolve parliament and call an election.)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/veto
This even appears in technical projects, e.g., Linus Torvalds, who's for years been the Linux kernal's "no" man:
[I]n the end, my job is to say no. Somebody has to be able to say no to people.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...
Smaller, simpler systems, with greater levels of trust, or greater inequalities of power, seem to avoid this. Large ones, not.
I'm sure there's some discussion of this in political theory, though I'm unaware of it. Listing out a typology of other loci of power would also be interesting.
This chart shows government spending by various levels of government: https://images.app.goo.gl/iVpyyr2Ftzo6m7PB6
In the US, about half of all spending happens at the federal level. Germany, which also has a federal system as a matter of its constitution, also has the central government spending about half of all government dollars. Canada is even more federalist. The vast majority, about 3/4 of 4/5 of government spending happens at the provincial level. Denmark also has the majority of spending at the local level. Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Chile, and Mexico are about the same as the US in pushing about half of all spending down to the local governments.