Your response hasn’t answered my question about why a non-democratic system is better. It further raises the question of why the president should be chosen in an undemocratic manner when all other elected officials in the federal government are?
The reason I mention we as individuals don't directly vote on laws - Congress does - is because of the impact on me as voter.
You are correct that individual officials are elected via direct popular vote, in each respective area. But that translates to a collective Congress which is what actually votes on and enacts policy as a result. We, as voters, do not directly vote on those (except for state/local related initiatives which are on ballots). The presidency is different, because as you've said, in that the president has a lot more personal influence than any individual congressperson.
In other words, for the results of Congress, we vote for people who collectively make decisions on behalf of the individual voters. So voting for a president would actually be different in some ways from this because the impact would be a single person directly elected by individual voters (where bills passed in Congress are not).
European countries are in fact actual different countries that did not allow free movement of various groups amongst themselves until recently. Thus their populations are more homogenous than US states, which rarely restricted movement of non-slaves between themselves.
This is because our states are not individual nations.
... duh?
My point, which you've missed, is that areas of the United States are dramatically different from each other similar to European countries. Unless you're going to tell me people in San Francisco/CA can empathize with the concerns of people in Nebraska etc?
Additionally, the EU executive has much less power than the US president, especially in terms of international treaty negotiations, police power, and military power. It cannot appoint a justice system that supersedes individual nations’ laws (member states appoint judges to the EU courts).
For these reasons I don’t think the US system is similar to the EU.
Currently? Yes. Historically? Much less so. The federal government has been increasing in power/scope pretty consistently for decades, regardless of party.
That being said I do not particularly expect any Republican or Democrat party candidate to run on a platform of "I will, actually and for real and not just making campaign promises, work on reducing the scope of the executive branch."
One clearly obvious option would be proportional assignment of electors within a state, which would then better represent citizens of that state and avoid the current problems of the electoral college.
This is entirely in the hands of states to determine and in fact several states do already this (Maine and Nebraska, though it's worth pointing out that gerrymandering is a major concern depending on how a state actually implements this).
A better solution is to recognize the primary problem with electoral voting and disproportionate representation is that the number of representatives in the House of Representatives has been capped for over 100 years, making the impact of population and electors from HoR disproportionately small vs each state's two senators. And for areas that have representatives and no senators, even moreso.
But really, with winner takes all approach, this results in a different problem - even if the electoral college is fair and reasonable itself, it means that states that have "clear" winners (say California or Wyoming, both of whom had massive margins in favor of Biden/Trump respectively) are basically irrelevant from the election perspective.
I have speculated a hybrid approach would be better - maybe the EC plus an additional number of guaranteed electoral votes which reflect the national popular vote? So a candidate who wins the popular vote receives say 50 free votes to be added to their state totals.
I also think that much of the problem we have with voting for president is the winner takes all approach basically guarantees a two party system. Or, more cynically if you prefer, a "lesser of two evils" situation. Because in a real sense, if you cast your vote for a non-R and non-D candidate your vote is rather irrelevant in almost all states. In fact, the only reason your vote even becomes relevant when it is relevant it is because you
didn't vote for the Democrat/Republican candidates.
A national popular vote without ranked choice voting exacerbates this problem for obvious reasons - it becomes even more meaningful to only vote for the candidates who have a chance at winning and all other votes are "pointless." I use quotes there because people vary in mindset on voting from pragmatic to idealistic/philosophical, which impacts the strength of a non-R/D vote being "pointless" or not. Regardless, ranked voting seems the only solution to get around that and personally, without it I do not think that national popular vote will make the general political situation better but worse.