There have been many non-democratic political arrangements in human history other than dictatorships.

Good point. For example, if you squint hard enough, the choosing of a council or legislature through lots as was done for a time in the Venetian state, is "democratic" in that everyone in some broad class (the people eligible to be chosen at random) had an equal chance to participate in the government, but would not meet with the approval of most modern advocates of democracy, even though IMHO it is worth trying again.

The Venetians understood that some of the people chosen by lot would be obviously incompent at governing, so their procedure alternated phases in which a group was chosen by lot with phases in which the group that is the output of the previous phase vote to determine the makeup of the input to the next phase with the idea that the voting phases would weed out those who were obviously incompetent. So, though there was voting, it was done only by the relatively tiny number of people who had been selected by lot -- and (if we ignore information about specific individuals) they had the same chance of becoming a legislator as the people they were voting on.

IMHO probably the worst effect of Western civilization's current overoptimism about democracy will be to inhibit experiments in forms of non-democratic government that would not have been possible before information technology (including the internet) became broadly disseminated. (Of course such experiments should be small in scale till they have built up a substantial track record.)