Well, no, mods on Reddit aren't democratic in the slightest, it's a basic dictatorship where the topmost mod has all the power. And in a dictatorship the best you can hope for is a BDFL, but BDFLs arise when a community starts small (and thus doesn't attract malevolent dictators) and congeals around someone benevolent. You can't take a large community and appoint a new dictator, because it will overwhelmingly attract exactly the type of person who shouldn't be the dictator. In practice, this will likely result in more malevolent dictators, not fewer.
In democratic places they replace people for a reason