What about those on the periphery, with minimal protection from the state both before and after the fall? For them, the only real difference was the tax collector stopped showing up.

Tax collector never stopped showing up - tax collector was just working for someone different after the Empire fell.

As for those on the periphery, the only ones which would have fit the idea of those with minimal protection from the state would have been those literally outside of the borders of the Empire - the Early Empire pursued highly proactive anti-raiding strategies on the border, with large forces ready to respond to any incursion, while the Late Empire stationed many small garrisons along all the borders.

Furthermore, there is ample evidence that the benefits of the Empire reached into the periphery, including the benefits of long-distance trade, high-quality consumer goods for the working class and peasantry, architectural expertise, and resolution of legal disputes.

Please don’t take this as analogous to the modern day in any way. A modern village/town will break down rapidly without access to modern logistics, which was not the case then.

No, places broke down then as well. After the Roman presence in Britain left, Britain itself not exactly being in the heartland of the Empire, the resulting collapse into infighting and outside raiders was so total that even things as simple and universally needed as pottery suffered a horrific decline in both amount produced and used in domestic consumption and in the quality of the work, to the point where post-Roman British pottery is instantly identifiable compared to Roman British pottery. Some 200 years pass before pottery quality begins to recover. Aqueducts stop working in short order if not dissembled and cleaned, lower quality roads (via glareata and via terrena) fade without regular maintenance, brigands destroy all semblance of trade and free travel, even farming techniques decline with large-scale local mortality without the ability of skilled migrants to transfer location and then transfer their skills.

Civilization is fragile, in all cases.

The slaves were much better off. Roman empire was a slave empire.

And the resulting polities were slave kingdoms. Wow. Much improvement.

That’s the main reason it’s celebrated in our empire. Europeans and the founding slavers of USA looked towards roman slavery as their ideal.

Wow, that's the dumbest thing I've heard in the past 24 hours.

Arguing for the roman empire is like saying that USA was better before the Civil War.

what

Today the worship of this slave empire remains a foundation of white supremacy.

Yes, the foundation of white supremacy was a multiracial empire which had very mixed feelings on those pale G*rmanic savages and thought of Africans and Syrians as the smartest people in the world. You nailed it.

Yes. It was bad for slaves as well. The post-Roman polities maintained slavery, so it's not "The slaves are now free", it's "The slaves are now under a system with a poorer quality of life for everyone, from top to bottom".

Bonded servitude (the superset of slavery) has been a universal thing throughout civilization, even though we have been dreaming of non-stratified societies at least since the enlightenment, and the occasional heretic / blasphemer / impious philosopher since the classical age.

So when we talk about peonage (bonded servants) in civilizations, we compare like to like, say slaves as they were regarded under Roman law vs. serfs during the middle ages. It's messy. We don't have slaves officially in the modern United States, but we do have forced prison labor (which we treat worse than Roman slaves) and we have child labor and immigrant labor, but these are thanks to blind spots in law and enforcement... but that means we have blind spots in law and enforcement were atrocity can (and often does) hide.

So slaves were better off in the Roman age than they were, say, during the Sugar plantation age here in the Americas. Peasants in the middle age had more rights but were just as bonded, and modern court systems emerged because letting the local lord adjudicate based on his gut feeling (oft while he was inebriated) resulted often in miscarriage of justice.

In the meantime, yes, we still fantasize about creating a system in which the lowest laborers can actually enjoy their work, and don't have to worry about precarity of food, housing, health, etc. We're totally not there yet and should be further along than we are.