Partly inspired on this question:
To say the Ottoman Empire was "doomed" is to think in teleological terms about history. However, it was certainly in poor straits. According to Dixon and Sarkees (2016), the Ottoman Empire experienced at least 33 civil wars (defined as nonstate rebellions that resulted in at least 1000 combatant deaths per year) between 1816 and 1914. It lost most of its European territory to such revolts (coupled with international intervention). It lost possession of North Africa to other colonial powers. In the Persian Gulf, Britain whittled away at its influence. And its attempts to compensate by spreading into the Arabian peninsula were met with wave after wave of revolts, including ones in Yemen and Asir that lasted until 1912. It really looked like a state that was falling apart, in purely territorial and military terms. About the only positive sign was that it actually experienced a couple of years of rough internal stability just before 1914.
Source: Dixon, Jeffrey S., and Meredith Reid Sarkees. 2016. GUIDE TO INTRA-STATE WARS, 1816-2014. CQ Press (SAGE).
No, the Ottoman Empire was certainly not on the eve of collapse prior to World War I. Reading the post of /u/k_hopz on the Habsburgs in your linked post, I find that nearly everything he said can be applied equally to the Ottomans. There is a growing body of historians who are attempting to overturn the “decline and fall” narrative, itself informed by Orientalism and by nationalist historiography, which saw the Ottomans as inherently antimodern and unable to bring the country in line with the west. For my own period, the seventeenth century, this revisionist trend has won the day and the notion of decline has been entirely rejected. For other periods, research is ongoing and new studies always on the horizon.
The issue with viewing the Ottomans as moribund is that it overlooks the degree to which the Ottoman state was able to successfully grapple with modernity during the nineteenth century. 1839 is the symbolic year in this respect, with the issuance of a decree launching the reform program known as the Tanzimat. Over the course of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was entirely transformed, with the establishment of a modern state and bureaucratic order, and a military based on mass conscription with modern training, discipline, and equipment. By 1876 the empire’s liberal intellectuals, influenced by European and particularly French thought, established a constitution for the empire. While none of these reforms were implemented perfectly – the constitution was soon suspended and replaced by the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II, until it was reestablished following the CUP coup of 1908 – the general trend was that the strength and vitality of the Ottoman Empire was increasing during these years. Even in the realm of economics, where European domination through the use of the old Capitulations agreements was most apparent, we find that Ottoman manufacturing was never entirely supplanted by Europeans on the domestic market. Per-capita wealth was on the rise throughout the nineteenth century.^1 My point in all this is that while it’s easy to highlight Ottoman troubles, to do so without also discussing the empire’s immense progress toward modernity is highly misleading.
Now, I want to address the term “collapse”. While the Ottoman Empire had lost quite a bit of territory since the beginning of the Tanzimat (1839), it had only done so through international intervention. The greatest examples of this are of course the 1877-8 war with Russia, which split Bulgaria off from the empire, and the First Balkan War of 1912, in which the empire lost all of its European possessions aside from Istanbul (some of which it recovered the following year). World War I destroyed four empires – the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman – but to say that the Ottomans were on the verge of collapse implies that they could have fallen apart on their own without the impact of another war. I don’t think this is really defensible. As mentioned above, the whole course of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of a powerful central state apparatus and the creation of a modern army which by 1914 had received training from German officers and been organized along totally modern lines. Again, that’s not to say that the Ottoman army was perfect, but rather that it was far from being backwards and ineffective, as one might have assumed from the decline paradigm. Its performance during World War I, including its ability to remain in the field on multiple fronts for the entire duration of the war, long after other powers had collapsed, was a testament to that.^2 The Ottoman central government was by no means on the verge of losing control over the country or seeing its authority collapse. With the restoration of the constitution in 1908, and later the seizure of power of the CUP triumvirate in 1913, for Ottoman thinkers the great questions of the day related to what form the government was going to take, and whether constitutionalism was going to prevail, not whether the state was going to disintegrate. It took the war to bring it to an end.