That seems dangerously optimistic to me though. If what should be done is not what elected officials will do, and what they will do is what should not be done, then isn't removing the barriers constraining them from acting just going to make things much worse? Even if you can get a government in office sometimes that is not malevolent, it would still be a net negative.

For it to be worth it, you would have to either have a realistic path to consistently electing people that serve the will of an informed and thoughtful population, or the circumstances are so dire and the need to make positive changes so desperate that things can't actually get much worse than a course of inaction so you might as well risk it. To me it doesn't seem like either are the case yet; there is no clear path to that, and things could be much, much worse.