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Notes -
I think the kernel of truth behind "Decadence" is simply selective pressure or lack thereof.
Hard times make strong men less because hardship is good for the spirit, but because hard times mean weak men perish. Effective strategies will outcompete ineffective ones. Weak men will either figure out how to stop being weak or be replace by those who do. Men who already are strong will rise to the top because they can deliver success - if you're not meritocratic, you will be outcompeted.
But once you grow to enough success, this changes, because your prosperity introduces slack that cushions inefficiency. You will no longer be immediately punished for operating inefficiently, because the system runs well enough and has enough inertia it can handle some inefficiency. The best way to power is longer to create it, but to politick society into giving it to you. You no longer need to invest wealth in that which promises progress, you can afford to spend it on practically useless, but beautiful art. When previously ensuring success for your son requires raising him into a strong man, because a weak man would quickly fail, you can now pass on the existing wealth and power to him and let him coast on it. If the army has better equipment and more numbers than any enemies, and a solid structure of professional staff officers and NCOs, even a nepo baby general can win.
So the structures ossify into something that serves a different purpose, and over time, such issues accumulate, the staff officers also become nepo babies, the NCOs and civil servants grow corrupt, the tactics grow obsolete, and the wealthy show off by employing armies of artisans instead of doing anything of practical value, all while your inertia prevents them from failing visibly. Meanwhile, your enemies still face incentives to become strong, and will eventually be able challenge you, and then the nepo babies, the corrupt viziers, and the artisans won't be able to effectively fight back. Your empire falls, your wealth gets looted, and your art either destroyed or left for later generations look at and wonder what happened to the civilization that created something as impressive as this.
The core mechanic isn't hardship as such, but lack of competition. It's the Great Empire with mostly barbarians on its borders that falls to this, because they have no actual peers who can outcompete them. Meanwhile, the european powers of early modernity always were surrounded by multiple equally strong rivals. So as soon as decadence started creeping in, one of those rivals would quickly pounce and deliver a humiliating but not fatal defeat, exposing everything that went wrong and leaving you to scramble to fix it, before your problems could ossify.
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