Honestly I think individualism is inherently in conflict with populations in the hundreds of millions. The more people you have, the more your chasing a local maximum contributes to a tragedy of the commons situation.
This works across a whole bunch of smaller geographic or even ideological alignment. Eventually you have to draw a line on individual freedom when it oversteps the values of the society, and you have to draw more of those lines the more edge cases you have to accommodate.
I think the opposite is the case. The larger the population, the more infeasible central control becomes. Also, individualism doesn't support polluting commons. To the contrary, I have no moral right to pollute another individual's space or air under individualism.
Moral right or not, you have to violate individualism on some level to enforce any action about it. Individualism need not be curtailed by a central authority; cultural norms can do just as good a job.
And for too many people, “individualism” really just means “other people should be free to be like me”.
Every individualist I know, including myself since I consider myself one, believes that a state is necessary to resolve and mediate disputes between individuals. So I don't think this is a violation of individualism. Even Objectivists believe in the courts and police. The key is that the state is there to protect individual rights, that's it.
I think you're exactly right, another poster raised the interesting point of whether where those lines are drawn is inevitable based on the circumstances or if we have a lot of collective control.
This works across a whole bunch of smaller geographic or even ideological alignment. Eventually you have to draw a line on individual freedom when it oversteps the values of the society, and you have to draw more of those lines the more edge cases you have to accommodate.