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This is a federalism issue, not a citizens' rights issue. The individual "princely" states in the post-Westphalia HRE were pretty absolutist. (Although the Peace of Westphalia included limited protection for religious minorities.)
The way I was taught about it was that there is an ongoing trend from a "medieval" model (strong territorial magnates, levy armies raised locally by said magnates, weak kings, self-governing towns with considerable privileges) to an "early modern" model (strong states, territorial nobility as a rent-drawing fossil, a royal government not run by the territorial nobility but whose members get ennobled and form a new court nobility, standing armies paid out of taxes, general drift towards centralisation and absolutism). The driving force is improvements in siege artillery, which changes the nature of warfare in a way which favours centralisation and professionalism in the military.
This process starts in the second half of the C15, with Edward IV and Henry VII renormalising England after the Wars of the Roses (roughly 1471-1509), Louis XI renormalising France after the French civil war that Henry V of England famously took advantage of to restart the Hundred Years' War, including bringing Burgundy and Brittany under royal control (1461-1483), and Ferdinand and Isabella unifying Spain (1474-1504). There is then a gradual process of consolidation (setting up increasingly bureaucratised royal governments, weeding out remaining territorial magnates who were strong enough in their areas to pose a threat, reforms to military and taxation systems). This process is interrupted by religious conflict during the Reformation (except in Spain which remains unified and Catholic, which is why Spain under the early Habsburgs is dominant despite being, well, Spain - they had higher state capacity) but continues afterwards. The first monarchs to complete this process are Louis XIII after he appoints Richelieu in 1624, Charles I during the personal rule after 1629 (and also Cromwell and his major-generals, after which the English decide to do something else which is not that, with long-term consequences for world history).
When you apply this logic to German-speaking Europe, the key point is that the weakening of the HRE (to the benefit of the major German "princes") is an orthogonal process to this kind of state-formation. The tl;dr is that the key points in the decine of the centralised HRE are the fall of the Hohenstauffen in 1254 and the Golden Bull in 1356 - well before the state-formation process we are talking about. The Henry VII/Louis XI style consolidation happens in the 1400s at the level of individual German states like Austria, Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg. After the 30 Years' War, the second stage development of early modern absolutist states happens at that level as well - mostly in Brandenburg and Austria.
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