There aren't many democracies left willing to pay for either of these mega events (or in case of F1, the starting fees for the teams), but there will always be a decent supply of dictatorships or oil sheiks wishing to white-wash their image and a supply of delegates/decisionmakers who can be bribed appropriately.
The idea that democracies aren't interested in hosting major sporting events isn't based in reality.
It's based on all of the contra-Olympic/WC movements that tend to crop up and successfully prevent any talks as soon as even rumors begin floating around.
> plus some petrostates and China
Out of the last 20 years worth of additions to the F1 calendar, we have Jeddah (Saudi-Arabia), Doha (Qatar), Baku (Azerbaijan), Sochi (Russia), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Istanbul (Turkey), Singapore, Bahrain and Shanghai (China) - which means 17 new tracks, of which nine are in a dictatorship of one or another kind.
That's just way too much appeasing to bribery for me.
The 2026 World Cup was awarded to "North America" because the only other bid was from Morocco and FIFA didn't think they had any hope of being able to pull it off. They estimated that Morocco would need to devote 15-25% of their entire GDP just to build the facilities. The North American bid just had a list of cities and stadiums that might host some games and told FIFA to take it or leave it. They only decided on which stadiums they are going to use last month! And the list is missing a bunch of big cities that said "no thanks, we'll pass"!
Apart from Qatar (and arguably Russia) World Cup's, including the one after Qatar don't appear to have been held in dictatorships at all.