Given Texas (much like the rest of the rural US) is built on a grid, can't you simply make the squares larger?
Here would be my proposal forTexas under such an assumption. Only one county in this map is smaller than 5000 people. The number of counties gets cut from 254 to 161, almost 100 counties get cut.
https://davesredistricting.org/join/fee90257-05e5-47b6-ab7c-1123bf486c2cAdmittedly this is a
very arbitrary map and if Texas wanted to cut on its number of counties it'd need a ton of intervention from people who actually know the area but at least in the west this is what I mean by "making the squares larger"
