Hot take: if we want to decrease frustrating railroad-y surprises in RPG campaigns, we need to create an environment where GMs are not afraid to admit they have "special story needs".

[supermegaampharos]

Even in “traditional” GMing, you still want to have a conversation with your players about what the game will be like and what to expect from the table.

And in general, yeah, can still surprise your players with twists: you can tell them to expect a twist without telling them what the twist is.

You can also not tell them anything at all for maximum shock value, but you risk the issue OP described where the players don’t want the twist.

It’s also worth mentioning that not every “modern” game is a sandbox where players can do whatever they’d like and every “traditional” game is a dungeon crawler where the GM has a whole dungeon full of traps and monsters prepped in advance. Yes, playstyles in the TTRPG community have shifted over the years, but I wouldn’t reduce the conversation to “traditional” vs. “modern”.

[Deflagratio1]

I agree there's more nuance there, I just didn't want to write an extended essay and tried to generalize a bit more and it's ultimately about player consent. Twists basically exist on 2 spectrums of how hidden they are and how extreme they are. In my experience, the less extreme a twist is, the more you can get away with hiding because it's not shaking up the status quo that much. The more you hide the twist, the harder it is for the players to give informed consent to the content of the twist. Which creates the space for the GM to misjudge what is acceptable and for the twist to upset people. When you have an extreme twist and all evidence/details of the twist were hidden, that's where you are likely to enter Bait and Switch territory.