Oddly enough, I'm vaguely in favor of this -- but at the same time I don't think it should be implemented. I've lived in a Unitary system (UK) through a bunch of different variations of a Federal system (NZ, Australia, Switzerland, USA, and even EU in a way) -- worth noticing Switzerland apparently was the inspiration for the Californian direct democracy. Each really favors a different set of circumstances. It was sh…
You may also be interested to know that it is a routine occurrence in the US at the municipality level. While municipalities frequently have normal levels of taxes sufficient to sustain current infrastructure, if a new school or police building or other significant expenditure is required, the town will often vote for releasing a bond and raising the taxes to pay for it. At least where I live, such votes are almost done deals; those measures will typically pass with ~90% of the vote.
"Interested in the counterpoints to all that."
Well, in a pretty real sense, it's precisely the failure of the powers to successfully aggregate that is the driving force here, where "failure" is defined as successfully meeting all the relevant stakeholder's needs. If aggregating powers was awesome and fixed all the problems, nobody would be having this discussion in the first place.