What Tsai represent is a country in deep in decline and which has lost its facilities of high reasoning, so that questions of "process" trump concerns about "outcomes". The question is not "who should rule", but rather "how does He rule"; that is, does the ruler "make things work right".
Furthermore, on the question of legitimacy; in what way does "mass participation" lesson the consequence of government to "make things work right"?
Do the citizens of Senegal suffer less from the failure of their democratic government to provide security and basic service because it was "democratically elected" than the people in the dictatorship of North Korea? North Korea has a higher standard of living over Senegal.
I have a home and office in Dubai, Dubai is an absolute monarchy; should I feel less pleased that things work right and I have a high standard of living then when I am in my home in London? The living standard in Dubai is higher than London; and the police far more polite.
Would any Saudi trade the rule of the House of Saud, authoritarian it maybe, for the "democracy" of Nigeria with the accompanying decline in living standards?
Who is better off, the average Chinese under the rule of the CCP or the average Indian with his democracy? What good is "freedom of the press" if you cannot read and cannot afford a newspaper? Do it benefit you to have "freedom of movement" when the streets are covered in human dung and their is no infrastructure?
The question of legitimacy is complete metaphysical nonsense; every government is "illegitimate" in the minds of some and "legitimate" in the minds of other; the power of government, in reality, is strictly a matter of the use (and/or threat) of violence against dissenters. Only if a significant portion of persons needed to enforce the decrees of government were to waffle (from feelings of illegitimacy or even before a superior force) can the government fall.
The great discomfort and deterioration of society that has come to the West from a century of universal suffrage and the worship of the "will of the people". Thus, no matter how well informed or educated the population, universal suffrage leads to a contest over the spoils of governement.
We can conclude that the history of democracy is the history of societal failure; from ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; time and again, we see that when governance is conducted on mass and equalized basis (equality in weight of opinions regardless of contribution or stake at risk) the result is first societal stagnation and then decline; some engage in wild adventurism before collapse.