Meh I mean you can be "sovereign" even if almost everyone around you hates you and the entire world doesn't recognize you, even if you are weak and others have "interest" in hurting you, so long as it's more hassle than it's worth for them to eliminate you. See the northeastern cantons of Rojava in Northern Syria.

I'm sure there are plenty of examples of unrecognized people living their lives in a "sovereign" way who could easily be slaughtered by their neighbors but the neighbors are just like fuck it, not worth losing a few of our guys to slaughter the unrecognized others. A slightly worse example is the Chechens, who gained a sort of unrecognized independence for several years until they became a bit more of a thorn to Russia who didn't really value their soldiers life much to begin with to worry much about the risks of putting them back down.

Not really. A country also has to have the ability to be able to defend itself. If every single country in the world recognized Sealand, but they only had a BB gun to defend itself, and 5 guys came up in a rowboat with some AK-47s, and took over Sealand easly, then that's that. What's the point of being recognized?

Example: Ukraine. They are being somewhat successful at defending themselves, and stomping the shlit out of Russia, at least so far.