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The status competition in East Asia extends to the status of one's children. Even if you were to magically boost the status of women with more children (and even give housing and financial benefits on top), that won't fix the intense status anxiety when it comes to how their children do in life.
In East Asia, status rankings are universal, overt, and familial. And because status is a positional good, it naturally invites full investment of every expendable resource. If you have to divide your resources across n children, they'll lose out to families with m < n children, which reflects badly on your own status.
There are easy ways of solving this, like limiting admission to all elite universities and prestigious graduate jobs to young adults with at least two siblings.
Would that be "easy" though? It seems like political suicide to propose such a policy and coercing private institutions to implement it would be difficult. Then there are all of the perverse incentives toward gaming the system. There would likely need to be carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications from a prior birth or other health concerns, so lots of buying out diagnoses under the table. Some might adopt a strategy of having the threshold number of kids and still hyperinvesting in only one. Etc.
When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage? If people actually want to solve the problem, they have to bite the bullet and get it done even if it makes some people worse off. Now I know that South Korea doesn't want to solve the problem and so they're mucking about with tiny financial nudges and lame govt programs.
How about we do that skipping for everything else first?
What's more important than the life or death of the nation? I said nation, not state. There are more important things in this world than raising the GDP figures and subsidizing the senescent.
I guess you have to smash the safety glass to get to the fire extinguisher... but that's included in the fire-extinguishing process.
I would say a large part of how we got here is by deciding that the "unfairly disadvantaged" must never be negatively affected by anything. But somehow it is only when those "unfairly disadvantaged" are a different group that we should skip those carveouts.
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