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I usually just bribe a few councilors ("Buy Favor" on the cheapest I can find) instead of worrying about loyalists. It always helps to have one or two on your council though.
OP, I do it all the time. You just have to have a ton of cash to do the above and roll back council powers. Then you have to manage your realm pretty actively to keep factions down. It's not really interesting to do so, at least for me, when I get too big. It's pretty great when you're smaller though and can just push through laws and not have to deal with "gifts", favors, and so on just to get stuff done.
With an abolished council, vassal opinion is paramount. I forget the exact number, as it's been dropped several times, but a vassal won't join an increase council faction if they are above a certain opinion of you.You should focus high diplo characters, increase noble customs, hand out all your minor titles to your most influential vassals, get marriage ties, assign vassals to mentor your children, bribe them if need be. Every little bit counts. If you can get viceroyalties, things become pretty trivial, just hand out viceroyalties to older people, and they'll die before the opinion bonus runs out, making everyone estatic for handing out titles to them. Non aggression pacts also prevent vassals from joining factions, but long term the marriage ties lead to lots of vassals having claims to the throne, making it risky to rely too heavily on. Consolidating your vassals can be easier as well, reducing the number of vassals you need to improve opinion with, but it also means the impact of an individual vassal not being with you is much higher. External wars are also a good source of opinion boosts. New territory means new opinion boosts to hand out.
You also want to consolidate your own powerbase. Faction strength compares your troops to theirs, meaning just having a bigger army can increase stability. As an independent ruler, you get a 50% levy bonus in your capital county, and a 25% bonus in the rest of your capital duchy. Personally hold as many holdings as you can in these places. Especially extra castles in your capital, as your marshal can also increase levy size in a single county. With a good marshal you can get over a +100% levy size in your castle. This is inefficient for spreading technology, and probably inefficient for income, but you don't want to be spreading tech to your vassals as an absolute ruler, as that makes it harder to maintain an advantage over them, and there are some income benefits for being highly consolidated, especially with a skilled steward, but I haven't seen anyone run the numbers one which does better.
Playing as an absolute ruler requires you to be a lot more on top of things. You are less restricted, but at the same time there's less mechanisms to protect you if you screw up.
I had a look at the game files, and it seems that an opinion of 25 is enough to keep a vassal from creating or joining this faction.
However, if the vassal is a council member himself, or has any of the traits Ambitious, Deceitful, or Envious, then it takes an opinion of 50 to keep them from it.
On the flip side, vassals become progressively _more_ likely to create of join the faction if their opinions dip below -10, -50, and -75.
The positive opinions appear to be absolutes (i.e. if you reach the required opinion they're safe), while the negative ones stack to make it more and more likely.
If anyone would like to verify or confirm this, the information is in common\objectives\00_factions.txt at lines 8174-8192 and 8417-8426 for the positive modifiers, and 8247-8258 and 8559-8570 for the negative modifiers.
(There are many other modifiers that affect vassals' likelihood to engage with this faction to be found in the file if anyone is interested.)
According to the wiki, it's a bit more complicated than that. There are thresholds to prevent a vassal from joining a faction, and then a higher threshold to make them leave a faction, meaning if they already joined it, or another vassal calls in a favor, they can still be part of a faction so long as they are below that higher threshold.
The minimum thresholds to prevent them from joining is 50 for succession factions, 25 for crown authority (without Conclave), 60 for an independence faction and 50 for increase council power (in place of crown authority with Conclave). The thresholds to make vassals leave are 75, 20, and 80, respectively. Interestingly, there is no threshold to leave the faction. The other factions apparently do not care about opinion of liege, but these are largely situational factions that you've done something wrong if they are able to form them.
I wonder where we can find this information in the game files? I can't locate it like the creating and joining modifiers.
Just to clarify, I was talking about factions to increase council power specifically, and not crown authority. For them the joining safety threshold is 50 only for council members and those with Ambitious, Deceitful, or Envious. For others it's 25. The Wiki is wrong on that one.