I fired up Victoria 3 again after they patched it but I got stuck because the capitalists basically refused to become politically active and form an industrialist faction with any amount of power, thus making it impossible to pass liberal economic reforms. As I was playing Japan, that meant being stuck in sakoku. Basically, Paradox seems to have bugged the game in a way that soft locks historical materialism
The only Industrialist pops I got were actually engineers, which gives me this mental image of a bunch of nerds desperately begging their bosses to be Captains of Industry and Turn the Wheel of History, and their bosses were simply taking giant bong rips and not caring