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I believe that any assimilation should have their politics and species rights.
More egalitarian empires could use only less oppressive species rights for assimilation and this should dictate pops happiness and number of pops being assimilated.
Assimilation could be forced - the fastest and with most penalties; encouraged - something in the middle; optional - slowest but with least or none impact, also, optional assimilation could made that materialist pops dont want to overcome psionic ascension or spiritualist pops will never undergo synth assimilation.
More egalitarian empires could use only less oppressive species rights for assimilation and this should dictate pops happiness and number of pops being assimilated.
Assimilation could be forced - the fastest and with most penalties; encouraged - something in the middle; optional - slowest but with least or none impact, also, optional assimilation could made that materialist pops dont want to overcome psionic ascension or spiritualist pops will never undergo synth assimilation.
Canonically, Materialists don't have the same visceral opposition towards psionics that Spiritualists have towards Synths. They just are displaying some pretty strong Arbitrary Skepticism towards psychic powers until they do Psionic Ascention. Even having Psychic Pops or one of them kooky fellows who's still respected in the scientific community who says he specialises in "psionics" only gets them as far as far as to research psionic Theory.
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They don't have the same visceral opposition because they reflexively assume psychic powers are fake even when presented with direct evidence that they aren't and even when having researched psionic theory, because psychic powers aren't materialistically explicable.
Spiritualists would presumably also not have a visceral reaction to people turning themselves into machines if they straight up didn't believe it and thought they were still normal people at the end of the process.
Materialists are dogmatically denying that psionics exist at all because it conflicts with their worldview. Spiritualists are dogmatically denying that it's a good idea because that conflicts with their worldview. Neither is accepting any input because they're a religious axis, not a religion vs robots axis.
I would say there is fairly simple logical reason to believe that synthetic ascension is just suicide with extra steps, but both within Stellaris are purely irrational. The end-run result of materialism is the elimination of your entire species, the end-run of spiritualism is the enslavement of it.
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I wouldn't say it goes as far as "the elimination of your entire species", for Materialism (if you actually believe such things). A Materialist would point out that, barring some intangible soul that persists, every interruption in consciousness (ex. sleep) is in every way equivalent to synthetic ascension. Your consciousness ends, and later a new consciousness resumes which is (mostly) the same as the previous consciousness because it has the same memories and neural structure (sans the changes caused by sleep itself). What difference does it make if the hardware is different?
It's a rational and coherent position (even if it's not one that I agree with), if you start from the assumption that there is no soul.
And if you are a Materialist, the Shroud does not necessarily imply a soul for exactly the reasons that people are insisting Materialists should be OK with the Shroud: to them it's just new physics.
Of course, it implies their replica is not actually perfect if it's not connected to the Shroud. But the synth body isn't subject to Alzheimer's, either, so it's clearly "imperfect" in quite a few ways. I imagine "can no longer by attacked or manipulated by psychics" is considered a feature, rather than a bug (since non-psychics can't use that ability anyway).
Also, IIRC, psychic leaders actually keep their trait when they ascend (which would imply that they can replicate it, but don't). But I think that's a bug which may have since been fixed. It doesn't come up often.
I would argue that the latter is far worse. No species is forever, through extinction or evolution into something new it is inevitable. The next step in said evolution being synthetic is no worse, from an objective standpoint, than anything else.
Also I do agree with some others in this thread that there are theoretical ways to preserve continuity of consciousness during the process. I vaguely recall some update, perhaps machine age itself, all but confirming it doesn't. And being rather annoyed about that.
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Until they suddenly psionically ascend and 1/5th of the population is suddenly psychic. At the point where they're so much as considering Psionic Assimilation in the near future, even a Fanatic Materialist Empire has a quite large minority of the populatioon able to lift things by thinking very hard at them. (Fanatic) Materialists are dense in that regard, but they're not THAT dense that waking up one morning to one out of every five person they meet in the Space Streets, on the Space Metro or the Space Bullet Train on their way to work, and one out of every five of their work colleagues lifting things by thinking at them won't make them reconsider their disbelief in psychics.
(Edit: I say 1-in-5 because IIRC a Leader from a Latent Psionic species has a 1-in-5 chance of being Psychic, but if I am wrong feel free to correct me.)