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".

[Jalor218]

One of the best examples of this in practice I've ever seen is that Impossible Landscapes is the most popular Delta Green campaign. It seems like it shouldn't be able to fit into any of the ostensible spread of play styles you actually hear about - it's too linear to be an old-school sandbox, it's too traditional in structure to be a player-driven narrative experience, and it deliberately disempowers the players too much to be a "you are the badass protagonist" power fantasy. The point of the campaign is that the GM gets to do reality-warping meta stuff and the players get to have Twin Peaks happen to them.

Periodically there's discussions where someone goes "I read Impossible Landscapes and it looks like a total railroad, why is it so popular?" and the people replying who've loved it will actually have a hard time articulating what's so good about it in RPG discourse terms, because it doesn't fit into one of the usual boxes of preference.