It does take more than one; it's a public process that usually takes about a week to complete, in which anyone can chime in and lobby for the article or, for that matter, fix the problems with the article.

It seems likely to me that a lot of people who are up in arms about "deletionism" really do think individual admins randomly zorch articles for no reason. That's not generally how it works.

That's exactly how I've observed it working.

And because none of the defenders were wikipedia insiders there was nothing anyone could do.

The policy must've changed then. My new article was deleted within minutes after creation by one person.

What was the article's subject?