One empty seat per row sounds like a balanced plane to me.
But only the specifics will tell as departure closes in. Anticipated freight/mail/fuel/etc.

"counted less towards the front"
Weight is weight. It's all "counted" the same.

They don't want to be "tail heavy"
True, but no more than they want to be nose heavy.
What they want is to be in balance. All other things being equal, a "center of gravity" towards the aft limit will result in a lower fuel burn so is typically considered optimal.

Back to the OP's concern:
I've never been qualified to do weight-n-balance calculation on any regional jets. But years ago I worked Load Control (weight-n-balance) for AAnother airline that operated a large number of MD-80s.
The MD-80s presented a challenge due to their rear mounted engines. That's a lot of weight at the "end" of the plane.

As such, an empty MD-80 sitting on the ramp was out of balance "tail heavy".
But put a passenger into every seat and the plane was now out of balance "nose heavy".
It's the number of passenger seats that are forward of the wing. Look at any aircraft type with tail mounted engines (like your CRJ) and note how the wings are aft of the halfway-way point along the fuselage (cabin), versus planes with wing mounted engines which typically have the wings in the center of the fuselage. This wing placement offsets the weight of the engines being so far aft ... and creates the need to be very careful of the overall balance.

The generic rule of thumb on working an MD-80 was that if the pax load were less than 50, load all bags/freight/mail in the forward cargo compartment. If the pax load were 30 or less, then you generally had to do "op up" upgrades to fill up First Class. Back in my day, the airline I worked for had a DFW-Fresno-Santa Barbara MD-80. On the last leg it wasn't unheard of to upgrade all pax and still need sandbags loaded into the forward cargo.

But most MD-80 flights didn't operate with that light of a load.
On full flights, there's not much you can do with the distribution of the pax weight. The cargo bins is where we "adjusted" the balance.
On flights from a hub to a spoke, it was easier ... load all bags aft, overflow into the center hold, all freight/mail (usually low for passenger carriers on domestic runs) forward.
On flights from a spoke into a hub, we like to keep "local" bags separate from "connecting" bags. The "local" bags usually going aft and connecting ones center (or vice versa).

But despite the best laid plans, sometimes last minute adjustments are needed.
When this is the case, and it's close to departure time, the fastest way to adjust the balance is to ask the self loading cargo (passengers/pax) to relocate. It's generally only needed at takeoff and possibly at landing. Those phases of flight are at slower airspeeds meaning the the control surfaces are less effective ... the full nose up/down limit will be hit sooner than when flying at cruise speed ... anyone who has driven a power boat can understand the relationship to speed vs control input.

Your (aft mounted engined) CRJ seems to be preplanned ok based on my MD-80 experience. Not a super light load nor a heavy one. Best to distribute the weight forward, but not to the point of filling every single seat forward of the wings.