The devil is in the details and a very careful process and very careful wording of said law could mitigate that to some degree. I mean representative democracy

The devil is in the details and a very careful process and very careful wording of said law could mitigate that to some degree. I mean representative democracy could also be considered a system conflicting in principle with values underlying a direct democracy, which, to be clear, I think would be an even worse system but my point is that regardless of which rules of the game you make up, there is almost certainly upsides and downsides to them. E.g. You want a functioning economy? Well, listening to the corporations that employ a vast majority of the workforce might be a good idea in principle - until they start corrupting politicians and the lobbyism presents a detriment to society at large. I think there is a lot of nuance when it comes to determining truth too. In germany for example the AFD is full of climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers. And even when there is a public discourse and plenty of information to discredit their lies, they keep growing in popularity - so even if truth presents itself, it is apparently of little consequence to their political power. And to turn that problem around: I think we are kind of in trouble when truth is primarily determined by democratic consensus and history has a lot of examples to show that. Furthermore for different types of statements truth has fairly different forms. If some politican made up that eating 4000kcal of raw sugar every day is the healthiest way to live and coincidentally his family runs a sugar plant then it's incredibly easy to discredit that based on scientific evidence from mechanistic studies to randomized human control trials. Now this is a case that currently is not handled in the political system and apparently impresses a significant amount of voters. At least from my perspective the lies used in european politics are in their quality not very far from the example given. Now what kind of punishment there should be for lying exactly and in which case I can not say. But leaving it up to the voters is showing to be increasingly fragile imho.