The advantage of bringing outside influence to bear is that if Paradox decided to hard code the limitation despite the existence of the soft code limitation in the player-facing files because they were bending to pressure, they can cite it as an example of pressure in the opposite direction and say their hands are tied. It doesn't avert the possibility of censorship in certain countries that may or may not have the largest land area, but it does insulate them somewhat as a publisher of other games from criticism that they as a company are hostile to the regime.
This is assuming good faith on the part of Paradox. The other advantage of outside influence is that they may not have acted in good faith, or this could just be a mistake, a miscommunication between developers, a legacy of earlier hardcode systems that were replaced with softcode implementation, or whatever. We don't know anything until someone responds. The journalists you're thinking of, believe it or not, have a lot of good will for the series and have celebrated the strides Paradox has made in, for example, making bisexuals not just lustful homosexuals and giving more attention to the parts of the world outside Europe that the game represents. I doubt they would push a 'burn it all to the ground' article to print over something that hasn't been officially responded to. It would be more like they'd reach out for a comment and either say 'This was weird but they've said they're fixing it' or 'This is weird and they've declined to comment.' Yes, the developers are busy, but their PR people aren't working on the patch coding, and again, this would be as simple as commenting out a little code.
There's every possibility that this thread will get buried without us ever knowing. I don't want to rake Paradox over the coals. I just want an explanation.