Someone asked me whether delegated voting counts as "democracy" or not.

Honestly, I care more about who ends up pressing the button in the end.
To put it simply, most people are too lazy to research proposals, so they delegate with a single click to a few "seemingly professional" entities, and over time it becomes very much like oligarchs taking turns controlling the game: tokens are in your hands, but the direction is in others' hands.
Project teams also use various incentives to attract votes, making the participation rate look high on the surface, but in reality, it's the same set of addresses repeatedly deciding how to split fees and where to channel incentives.

Recently, modularization and the DA layer narrative have become popular again, developers are ecstatic, but ordinary users are confused.
This information gap makes delegation even easier to turn into "I don't know either, just follow the big guys."
Personally, I now prefer to vote less, but I keep an eye on a few key proposals: how the money is spent, how fees are split, whether there's a mechanism to revoke permissions;
As for the others... forget it, don't treat "governance" as faith, managing it as a risk exposure might be more realistic.