But my impression is that several of the commonly mentioned negative effects go beyond than what can be explained by just change. Is this really so? If yes, would a cooling climate (beyond restoring pre-industrial conditions) bring more positive effects?
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere we're currently experiencing has not been seen on earth for about 800,000 years IPCC AR5 and the consequences of this change in radiative forcing are massive. Particularly as we've engineered this change in the last 150 years or so (ridiculously fast as far as natural systems are concerned). The change is extremely large in magnitude and speed - and this is going to have a huge impact - so I think you're right in that pretty much any change is bad change. My best shot at some positive human results are
1) an ice-free northwest passage round the top of Canada and
2) a marginal improvement in the UK for agriculture
These are of course completely outweighed by the other costs - in both human and natural systems.
A cooler climate would also have both positive and negative effects, but we are not likely to get that for some considerable time.
There are other ways in which human civilization has adapted to current regional conditions: Communities rely on air conditioning in the summer and/or heating in the winter to make regions tolerable. Harbors and coastal communities are built to suit current sea levels. In general, increased temperatures will make warmer regions less tolerable and more expensive to live in (through cooling and similar costs) and more prone to deadly heat waves, while potentially making colder regions more tolerable and less expensive (through reduced heating costs). Similarly, dramatic cooling would also affect where everything grows, reduce growing degree days for growing plants, and making colder regions less tolerable and more costly.
While attempting to quantify the "Country-level social cost of carbon," a 2018 study in Nature Climate Change by Kate Ricke, et. al. assessed the net economic impact on individual countries and concluded that the costs are "unevenly distributed": "Countries that incur large fractions of the global cost consistently include India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States."
Northern countries such as Russia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland actually receive a slight direct benefit from climate change through factors such as reduced heating costs.