The problem is that the agriculture economy only needs a few people, so everyone else is standing around trying to find a way to live, and there is no way, so they work as entertainment for the rich and powerful.

Your observations are correct, but they won’t change the bigger economic point of rural society being economically non-viable.

It’s really similar to mining towns, mining also got heavily mechanized and automated, it’s just that there’s no cultural traditionalist fantasy to reproduce for entertainment, for performance, within the mining economy.

There is a different strategy of repopulating rural lands, but that is not going to happen within the current economy and goals. That would require much more organized sacrifice, plus exceptional logistics and transportation (not cars.) Otherwise, rural life always will mean a lack of access to education, healthcare, civic life and democracy, and even good plant-based food.

Right now we’re suffering from the failure to modernize fully, the process is uneven and exploited by the privileged. We either need to finish building modernity or we do something totally different. Fascists and conservatives use these stranded masses to gain power, and that leads to collapse. It’s all very unsustainable, this middle-ground, this incomplete transformation, like a bird that didn’t fully get out of its egg.