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Political discourse is annoying in America because the stakes are perceived as so high and it's like a spectator sport, but that never really ends. Politics is also very personal in America. The 'us vs. them' mentality makes politics in the US more divisive or polarizing than elsewhere in the world, although it's not like this isn't seen elsewhere too...but it's amplified by social media and a 24-7 news cycle.
Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.
e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).
Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.
The Electoral College for example as such a structure...if as few as 100k voters can decide the outcome of the election ,it means a lot of campaigning to reach them. under a mandatory popular voting system, there would be no need for campaigning or politics for that matter , as democratic win would be foregone conclusion .
100,000 voters cannot decide the outcome of US presidential elections. Given certain assumptions about which states are and are not in play, sure, but those assumptions are predicated on the votes of tens of millions of other voters; these 100,000 voters cannot elect Zombie Hitler over the objections of the rest of the country.
100,000 voters voting the other way would flip most Australian elections to the other major party, too (although admittedly we have a much-smaller voter base), at least if you got to pick exactly which ones to flip lots of marginal seats to 50%+1 the other way.
It should be noted that we just flat-out do not have any direct equivalent to the US President with a nationwide election for one position - the Australian Prime Minister is not directly elected but rather elected by the House of Representatives, and can have lost the two-party-preferred vote if the voters for that party are better distributed among seats (this happened in 1998; the two-party-preferred vote narrowly favoured Labour over the Liberal/National Coalition but the latter won more seats and thus government). And our Senate favours less-populous states over more-populous ones in precisely the same way as yours does - Tasmania gets 12 Senators just like New South Wales, despite NSW having over 14x Tasmania's population (though the territories, which are even less populated, do at least get fewer, and Tasmania's an outlier among the state populations).
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It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.
While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.
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