Article 7 doesn't seem to mean anything does it?

Spain just crushed a political movement trying to organise a referendum through force. It arrested the leaders and the rest of the EU is helping them catch the ones that fled. They call it a rebellion and state that Catalonia can never be independent.

Not an Article 7 violation, apparently. According to the EU it's merely an internal matter.

Hungary elects a government by a wide margin, it's a popular government, and the government reflects its people's disagreement with EU policies that aren't in any treaties and weren't in anything Hungary previously agreed to. This is apparently a violation of "rule of law" and "not democracy".

The EU's definition of democracy is anything that helps the EU, simple as that.

And Russia considers itself to be a democracy. There's a big gray zone between good government and a self-admitted dictatorship. Smart modern authoritarians know that they need to maintain the pretense of democracy (for reasons like the one you note), and they do a passable job--look at something like Cambodia. That's what makes tools to exert personal power while still complying with the law as written so important.

Why do you think the GDPR needs to give the government that much power? For a simple example: Why is 20M EUR the right statutory maximum? If the regulators would never enforce it, then why does it need to be so high?