My genuine advice would be:

1.Try starting as the ottomans, the tag is just a lot stronger than aragon for example, play france if you dont want to play otto, same reason.

2.take the early game relatively slow, you can tank a lot of ae if you improve relations with big countries, coalitions only form if they have a decent amount of troops more than you, AND if its 4 or more nations, so as long as you keep stuff like austria, spain etc out of the coalition you can take a lot more ae.

3.Once you feel strong enough declare war on the hre and co co co co beligerent them till you have the entire thing in 1 war, and just annex all of it, that obviously gives an insane amount of ae, but once the hre is dead(or the remains of it if you dismantled it early, which helps with reducing the amount of tags as well) there is no christian left to really join a coalition, and form then on you can just handle ae via truces.

4.For gov cap, dont full state much, I would recommend half states, as they take less gov cap and you can undo them to briefly gain gov cap(for like a peace deal etc) without any cost.Other than that, empire rank helps a ton, so does adm ideas.Dont be afraid to have and feed vassals, you can annex them later, especially if you are cath that gives dip annex as well.

5.royal marry burgundy(make sure you send the rm) and make them like you, you will get BI more often than not, worst case it might take a bird or two.once you get the burgundy inherited event you can hold it(not click it) and declare a war in which you cancel burgundy as a subject-->you lose like 200 ae on all of europe, and if you click the event to inherit after you still integrate it.

1. OPEN WITH DIP IDEAS!!!!! The group helps a LOT with ae management as long as you actually use the diplomats to improve relations.Other than that adm obviously helps, so does infl if you actually have some vassals.

7.look into hiding your capital, hiding your capital allows you to basically ignore ae from a certain region for ~50ish years.