Democracy, strictly speaking, would be to periodically elect the most popular formatting policy once every sensible-time-period.

I’ve seen companies with such a large amount of developer churn that literally one person was left defending the status quo saying “we do X here, we voted on it once in 2019 and we’re not changing it just for new people”. 90% of the team were newcomers.

(The better teams I’ve worked on maintain a core set of leaders who are capable of building consensus through being very agreeable and smart. Gregarious Technocracy >> Popular Democracy!)

Ah, the infamous, but fictional, Monkey Ladder Experiment.