I wouldn't consider ghost cities and wasteful expenditure on infrastructure to just prop up GDP as good governance. As the saying goes not all that glitters is gold.
Democracy is messy, but there is some kind of transparency (freedom of press) that brings up issues out in the open.
Let's not be impatient with Democracy lest we lose all that we valued without us realizing it.
A lot of the ghost cities news has been debunked as of late. When the news stories were coming out, a lot of the cities were just recently built. A decade+ later, a lot of the areas have been filled in...
"A lot" isn't really doing much for your argument that the existance of ghost cities is "debunked", given that it implies there are still ghost cities.
