Maybe the most spectacular failure of a high strategy in a centralized declining empire in recent memory is the way Louis XIV's played France. Building Versailles was basically the stationary-predator equivalent of exhaustion-hunting the aristocracy, forcing them to domesticate themselves (and, unfortunately, domesticating his own successor as well). This effectively destroyed the mids as power players, but didn't replace them with anything, and was accompanied with an expansion of the administrative state for purely extractive purposes. This created the incredibly explosive environment that enabled the Low Revolution.

What would a better-played version of this strategy look like? First, send your sons abroad for education, hire the best tutors, do whatever you have to to keep them away from Versailles and out of the hands of others like the Church who would subvert them. Second, Versailles is needlessly wasteful - harvest the free energy you're releasing by training your surplus aristocrats in something likely to produce long-run instantiations of your values (e.g. make them a viable competitor to the priestly class that's more French), but that isn't a direct threat to your power, instead of just peacocking. Third, when centralizing extractive institutions, again put a lot of work into causing them to directly instantiate your values as a side effect.