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First four lines: as said in OP, "none of those are really plausible", I agree.
I think the more plausible explanation is work culture, tbh - but, idk, it'd probably be illuminating to have someone who lives/d in sk/japan/china write about it, which presumably is on the internet somewhere, maybe on reddit or substack. Within the US, we see the opposite - more traditional cultures have higher fertility rates - even in very small senses like Rs having higher than Ds or christians having higher than muslims, mormons have significantly higher birth rates, haredi jews and amish have much higher birth rates, so it seems unlikely as a large-scale explanation.
Korea completely transformed itself from an agricultural country to one of the most advanced countries on the planet in a matter of decades. I think that goes a long way to explain their broken fertility rate.
I don't think industrialize late --> want to catch up --> over orient toward modernity is an implausible hypothesis
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The work culture of these territories has eased year on year though, yet the fertility rate has continued to decline, one possible answer may be that they simply haven't gone past the filter of ease of work that results in a population rebound.
My personal hypothesis based on living in the East is that for the longest time sexual mating pairings were based on family/ community approval, so in a more modernized society where children are no longer interested in their families selecting sexual mates for them, they have no reference point or experience of directly initiating sexual relations or long term interactions with the opposite sex on their own. Add on to this the fact that their moral claims of how the opposite gender is supposed to be appears to be almost childlike in its purity, most people when interacting with the other gender would be finding something far more repulsive than whatever ideal standard they have in their head, a problem that is becoming apparent even in western mating settings.
Mormons are a minority outlier similar to the Amish though. Haredi jews are poor or deeply religious groups within their communities.
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