In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that by the TNG era, the Klingon Empire actually has a very well-developed and stable bureaucratic state, and the squabbles between the Houses on the Council are mostly symbolic and fairly irrelevant to most of the real process of governing... they may not actually have much in the way of consequences beyond transient control over the military itself, akin to (say) contemporary squabbles between the four branches of the US military, or between the DOD, the State Department, and the NSC. And the Klingon military is, traditionally, pointed very much outward — concerned with expanding the Empire, not managing day-to-day business within it — which is probably a relief to the Klingons in charge of the latter.
The problem with this theory is, the dispute over succession to the council really DID plunge the Klingon Empire into civil war, onein which the loyalty of the military and its various commanders depended more on personal allegiance than anything else. Gowron quite literally bribes Worf's family into supporting him and the Duras Sisters probably did the same thing for their own supporters (and being backed by the Romulans, had PLENTY of bribe money). And there's also the separatist movement on Krios, which also seems to have the backing of the Romulans through the cooperation of a double-dealing Klingon diplomat. All of which suggests that the Empire's control of both the military and its colonies is tenuous at best.
Put another way: In a situation where the loyalty of the military cannot be fully counted on by the incoming head of state, then the military's willingness to crush dissent in the colonies also depends on them having a personal stake in the outcome. In which case -- as I have often mused in fanfiction -- the Klingon Defense Force is pretty much just the world's largest mercenary corps, and the High Council is its number one investor. They're able to crush dissent ONLY insofar as they're able to pay the warriors to do the deed; if the war becomes too expensive or the High Council can't afford to pay for the amount of troops and material needed for the conflict, the KDF goes home.
Backtrack to the Discovery era, and we can explain this pretty simply: the KDF as an entity doesn't actually exist yet, or at least, isn't a major component of Klingon society. Maybe its only job is to defend the homeworld or just the First City, while the rest of the Empire is managed by the private armies of individual houses. The reason the Empire is fragmented to this degree is because they have no CENTRAL government to speak of, just 24 super wealthy families that get together every now and then to make major decisions over the fate of the "Empire" as a whole. If one of their colonies breaks away, then the family that owns it is responsible for crushing dissent, and more than likely, a rival family backing rebels on said colony is a fairly common cause of this sort of incident.
The trouble is, we honestly just don't know. Given the focus of this whole season, I had hoped that Discovery would move significantly away from the RDM template (notwithstanding its acknowledgment of 24 houses), and clarify some of the political intricacies of Klingon culture in a more coherent way, but at least so far that's clearly not happening. (It's certainly moved away visually, but that's not an improvement.)
I thought it was clear. The "Empire" is a state that is only unified by the Council's willingness to cooperate with each other; they don't meet regularly, or even particularly often, which is why they're so annoyed with T'kuvma -- an outsider -- for using the beacon to summon them, but it's also why T'Kuvma is heard scolding them for only looking after themselves instead of working together to unify the Empire. It's also why Kol is still having to do things to try and get more and more great houses on his side, up to and including stealing T'Kuvma's cloaking technology and offering it to his allies.
It was equally clear that the Klingons of the past were relatively advanced in the past, possibly even in the time of Khaless, which the beacon strongly implies. Aside from the fact that most of the Klingon "military" is turned inwards, it suggests that this, too, wasn't always the case, that the Klingon obsession with militarism is a relatively recent phenomenon and T'Kuvma's fundamentalism is the search for an idealized past that was never real in the first place.
