Total subjugation is internally stable - your peasants are not that likely to revolt, but you will fall behind your more open neighbours because you'll be much less productive, and that opens you up to external threats. Tsarist Russia and other nations of the time did not really have a choice to abandon industrialization for the sake of stability, it would just have caused it to be ripped apart by the industrialized nations - perhaps sharing the fate of the Ottoman Empire or the fate of China in the Opium wars.

East Germany vs West Germany; North Korea vs South Korea - and that's in less than a century. On a longer timescale, think Ming and Qing dynasties compared to Europe on the same timeframe - China was much more stable during that time, but stability was not sufficient in the long run. However, the current PRC is perhaps a counterexample, though there is a lot of nuance, external conditions and multiple very different approaches that the China leadership tried out during the last 50 years.

From this you could then make the case for instability in the current developed-world being a healthy phenomenon. Which is a nice thought if true.

The argument cuts both ways:

Early tyrannical states and back-breaking agriculture outcompeted relatively free and comfortable hunter gatherers.

That only works if there is an open neighbour. If we end up with authoritarian control being ubiquitous, as potentially with a victory by the axis powers, or the success of global Communism, there wouldn't be any open neighbours to compete with.