Look, I'm not interested in whatever slippery slope, deleting the differences argument you want to play at. There is a very large difference even now between a dictatorship and a democracy and the difference absolutely revolves around centralization of power and you can't handwave that away by saying the quantity of people in titled jobs is only marginally larger in a democracy. There are thankfully qualitative differences in where that power lies. Even in quantity your argument tends to break down. For example, if you take America as an example, the number of people employed in the executive branch of the government is estimated at 4 million and the total number of employed in governmental work is over 9 million which is 6 percent of all employed. That isn't nearly the same as a handful of religious or militaristic leaders deciding upon their own commandment laws. 9 million people is both a sizable quantity and a giant qualitative difference as a government of that size requires semi-rigid systems of rules to work, which helps to protect a complete dissolution of the democracy.

And it is only one example of such a government, there are democracies that are far more representative of their people, having voting mechanisms that allow for a larger number of proportional parties, which is another kind of social safeguard against ideological shifts.

As for an argument of what do the details matter between where and why you are killed and for what, I don't see how you can ask that in good faith. If you die because you hung yourself or you died because someone broke into your house and shot you, you're the same level of dead so what does it matter? If the whole of your initial question is what are the differences in two styles of governance, you can not look at individualistic outcomes and ignore the details. The difference is in the details, they are what make things different.