I think a pass on discrimination laws and the closed border stuff would help a lot - a ton of agitators at game start are just totally uninvitable and that definitely slows things down yeah.Unfortunately I think, to a degree, that's working as designed - pops are way less likely to leave their farms now, so you have to slowly ramp to a more complex agricultural economy before you can start industrializing. More historically accurate but less fun, slower gameplay for the player.
For now, you've got to get people's qualifications and literacy up as high as possible as quickly as possible, which motivates them to get urban jobs and join interest groups with actual power. And yeah, just hope for a good die roll on leader ideologies. I've had success in smaller nations with inviting agitators that can actually rile up the farmers, but that's a no-go in places with Closed Borders.
Ultimately I don't think the patch is balanced for one-province countries at all - I suspect they're going to lower the "stickiness" for pops in the next few patches, because it's just not fun. Paraguay, which was advertised with new content, is virtually impossible to play currently, because their leader lives forever and gives huge debuffs on top of the decreased pop hiring.
I actually don't at all mind the loop of needing to force the peasants off their land to industrialize in the abstract. Like you said, it's historical, and it adds some extra teeth to the landowners, which I don't mind. But the ahistorical starting laws make it so damn hard to even *start* making progress that it's easy to get stuck, which is a bummer.