In the current beta, I never felt that the lost population due to recruitment was meaningful. The only times when I care about it is when I want to recruit from a freshly built town (mainly a pioneer from the initial town) and I need to wait a turn before doing so. Yes you can (slightly) slow down your city growth by recruiting too much, but even that is pretty minimal compared to the population growth due to prestige.

As far as I can see, there is 3 factors that prevent recruiting from meaningfully affecting your population:

Recruiting time: Right now, it takes 4 turns to get 1 soldier, and 30 turns to get 20 soldiers (the quickest you can get). But you get 1 population per turn, before any prestige-enhancing building. So in the early game, you can slow down your population growth by 1/4, while in the end game, you can slow it down by 2/3. Although by then you will probably have inns and such, so the reduction will be much smaller.

Wages: You pay 0.2 gold per soldier per turn. So a gold mine (5 gold) can allow to afford 25 soldiers. A farm (4 food) allow 4 huts, for a total of 100 citizens. Assuming that you get equal bonuses on both resources, you end up with a maximum of 20% of your whole population being in your army. Not a very big impact.

Recruiting cost: This is actually something which got better compared to the previous betas. It cost 2 gold and 1 material to recruit the cheapest possible soldier. With a merchant and a workshop, you can get half of the gold and all the material for it per turn. So you shouldn't have any issue paying for a soldier every two turns. Of course better units are much more expansive, but you are still able to pay for the recruitment of huge peasant armies. The problem is that it just takes too long to do so.

So, does anyone have any comment on the way recruiting only barely impact population in the current beta?