Why won’t the omnipotent puppetmasters at the DNC pick Johnny Unbeatable?

It’s amazing how many people who are paid to write about politics believe that the FIELD WAS CLEARED for an incumbent president running for re-election:
Post below is from NYT politics reporter. Here's how "clearing the field" actually works.
1) Both parties full of people who think they should be prez.
2) *As soon* as any of them thinks it would pay off for them, or the party, to run against an incumbent, they do so. See:… https://t.co/lKsLxsGO1A— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 15, 2024
To ask Herndon to specify the mechanism by which the MSNBCified Dems “cleared the field” would presumably be unrealistic. But at a minimum I would think that anyone asserting that Democrats “cleared the field” for Biden in 2024 needs first of all to specify which candidate would have beaten (or even seriously threatened) Biden had they been “allowed” to run. Needless to say, we’re never going to get one for the reasons that Fallows explains — especially in the era of small-donor internet fundraising and unlimited self-funding there is no institution that can “clear the field.” If another candidate thought they could beat Biden they would have run. The problem is that reporters like Herndon hate Biden so much that they can’t even imagine that the typical Democratic primary voter likes him.
And the same handwaving problem fatally infects the argument that almost inevitably follows from assertions that Democrats CLEARED THE FIELD — that the DNC should impose an alternative candidate (but not the sitting vice president either!) to Biden by fiat. As Paul says, whatever you would like the norms to be, the norm that exist is that voters pick the nominee. Overriding the will of the voters would not produce a legitimate candidate even if there was a Johnny of Jane Unbeatable ready to unify the party, which there isn’t. The paradox of Johnny Unbeatable being why the unbeatable super-candidate had no chance of beating the allegedly awful candidate Joe Biden in the primaries, hence the felt need to square the circle with the “CLEARED THE FIELD” bullshit. I also guarantee that many of the pundits demanding that the Democrats replace Biden with Sen/Gov Unbeatable (D-Ice Cream Castles In The Air) would quickly find many problems with the actual flawed candidate Dem elites chose.
If Joe Biden had decided not to run, would a stronger candidate have emerged? I have no idea! Gretchen Whitmer might be the next Barack Obama, or she might be the Democratic Party’s answer to Scott Walker. But what I do know is that Joe Biden is running, representing liberalism against fascism. That doesn’t mean ignoring or unskewing unfavorable polls, or not reporting genuine bad news, or not criticizing Biden if he does something to merit it. But fantasizing about Johnny Unbeatable coming to save us is a massively counterproductive waste of time — it poses as hardheaded realism, but at bottom it reflects a fundamental unseriousness about actually trying to win the election.