Actually, what happened was that there was no democracy, the ones who grabbed power were the same old communist party assholes that ruled before. And when tens of thousands of people gathered to protest and demand that no communist party members be part of the new government, said communists (i.e. Iliescu) shipped over ten thousand miners and had them beat the protesters to death in the streets because 'they're threatening your livelihood.'
Of course people would have preferred Michael to that.
Romanians didn't care about having a king or not. They cared about not being ruled by communists, and Michael didn't just have good PR, he'd lived up to it - he'd been deposed for opposing communists and refusing to be their puppet when that was no longer openly possible.
You should see the Romanian constitution, over 80% of the articles in it end with 'as stipulated by current law.' The 'democratic' constitution was designed in such a way as to make abuse of government power every bit as legal as during the PCR times.
More on topic, Romanians believe that Michael would not only not have stood for atrocities like the Mineriad, but he was popular enough with the army (and also inherited his grandma's popularity with them) that the military would have jumped to crush atrocities like the Mineriad immediately, without needing to impose martial law. It says a lot that it took over twenty years since the 'revolution' to wear the army down to caricatures like you see further west, and even so they're doing the best they can with cut funding (they're also immensely popular, specially compared to the gendarmerie).
100K in crypto, or 100,000 BTC? The latter is a LOT more money.
I don't know what to feel about this story, at this point I'm half-convinced US intelligence services do all this intentionally and are just using the classic scapegoat gambit.