What took me a long time to understand is that you have to differentiate sharply between the formal rules of a state and the actual real-world freedoms available to an individual living within it. "Go...
I think the best real-world examples are not entire countries but regions inside functioning European states: Spain and Italy, then Portugal, then perhaps Czechia. These offer high protective capacity with low intrusive density. Spain has a decent baseline legal protection but is highly regionalized in governance – you don't have a light state on paper, but it offers you a strong legal "shell" that coexists with more breathable local enforcement cultures (depending on region).