The thing is, the argument I outlined earlier wouldn't have been very compelling a decade ago. As you have shown, there are examples of speech restrictions that

The thing is, the argument I outlined earlier wouldn't have been very compelling a decade ago. As you have shown, there are examples of speech restrictions that aren't that big a deal. Some people might indeed debate the finer merits of free speech such as genocide denial in such and such countries but in the end it rarely affects the entire fabric of society beyond a few individuals getting convicted here and there. So to answer your question, I do think Germany is still democratic despite my own argument because whatever restrictions currently exist aren't that important in the bigger picture of how the state functions. But now with social media misinformation, we are moving from the tutorial of shouting 'fire' in a theater to the boss level whose final form we can only speculate on. That's what in my opinion ought to motivate some fundamental questions about what democracy is actually supposed to be moving forward. Essentially, I'm totally on board with your failure mode idea: it's just that we diverge on the definition of what democracy is. If the future of society consists in heavy manipulation of information feeds for the purpose of maintaining a specific equilibrium, I believe it is better referred to as a technocracy especially if that manipulation will mostly be done by tech companies and other unelected officials. In this case, if Germany were to regularly curtail certain forms of speech with fundamental consequences on how the broad masses of voters behave (a path it is already on in my view) then it will eventually cease to be meaningfully democratic as the years go by. But I accept and understand that there are other ways of evaluating the situation.