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the electoral college experiment should be abandoned. It clearly didn't serve the function it was intended to serve when it was implemented 200 years ago.
It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.
A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn't entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say "nah" to legislation.
Okay, but the entire idea was to allow the electors to basically go against the will of the people, if the people are a bunch of idiots and elect a despot wannabe. And when a despot wannabe actually got elected, the electors didn't go against the idiot electorate.
Well, they didn't specifically feel concern for them electing a despot. They were concerned simply that they might pick wrong from the viewpoint of those with political power at the time. They weren't specifically afraid of a despot or demagogue, but someone who would either threaten the political elites wellbeing, or loosing support from the "less populous" slave states. A system that gives disproportionate weight to smaller states to buy their support while also giving themselves more influence over a check on the legislature and one of the branches of power is what they went with.
They weren't afraid of Trump, they were concerned about Lincoln.
Now all electors are party loyalists chosen by their party, nobody aint doing any faithless defection.