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I think the decline in fertility below 2.1 (replacement rate) can be directly linked to modern day feminism and women's rights. However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies.
For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4.
In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.
Now one may argue that the decline in fertility rate is not due to feminism and women's emancipation but rather due to improvements in wealth of society. However, a counterpoint to this is that faster modernizing societies; in terms of becoming more feminist, tend to have declining fertility rates even when not wealthy nations.
Example- Nepal - 1.8, India - 2.0-2.1.
Based on the above data I would posit that feminist societies result in fertility rates declining to below replacement rates, but once a country is wealthy it is far worse for the population to remain conservative than for it to be a feminist nation due to the fact that conservative rich nations do far worse on population growth than feminist nations.
Conclusion - modern feminism doomed/ saved human civilization to constant steady population decline and that's the best case scenario for population demographics from all the options currently available.
Thoughts?
"The west", "Asia", and "India" are large areas with complex culture that are internally similar in many ways. So you'd expect china/japan/SK to have similar birth rates, and to be similarly feminist - but there are many other potential causes, as there are many other shared attributes. So just picking two ways in which the areas are internally similar and externally different doesn't prove much - maybe it's skin color? maybe it's "collectivism/individualism", maybe it's the legacy of communism, maybe it's that "paradoxically, countries that industrialize late feel the effects of modernity more rapidly". none of those are really plausible but - maybe it's japan/china/SK's work culture? dunno.
As for why SK/japan are so low - are there any in depth articles exploring why, from the details of the lives of people who live there? The similar-person who would get married, or have a few kids out of wedlock in the US - what do they do in japan instead? Large-scale "data-driven" articles about it are numerous but fail in a similar way to the above.
Why would skin color make people have less children?
Why would collectivist ideals create less children when under collectivist ideals people work for society?
The legacy of communism never reached India or Singapore.
The Arab states were barely a few decades later than Europe, yet their fertility rate remained very high for a long time and only began to start declining to near replacement rates around the same point in time where they started attempting to culturally modernize.
Mexico is the most overworked country in the world and has a far higher fertility rate than the developed Asian nations.
Among commentaries by Japanese women, South Korean women, one of the primary reasons listed appears to be that they are required to focus both on their careers but also expected to live by very old traditionalist gender norms once they get married. This fits within my statement that modern industrialized and developed societies with traditionalist gender roles would see the greatest decline in fertility rates.
As far as I can tell the shoe I claim fits is fitting better than any of the shoes you have stated as alternatives.
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.
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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