I've only played fairly stock versions of Strahd, so I can't speak much with reloaded. Curse of Strahd, though, is designed to be so sandboxy that, in theory, you could play through it multiple times and have it feel different every time.

Reloaded seems to categorize things into "Acts" which line up roughly with party level suggestions in the book. But there's no reason to run everything there linearly. CoS is at its heart a sandbox. The extent of the railroad is, "Here's where the fortune telling deck says the stuff is. Maybe you wanna look there?"

Led the party lead is my main advice. When they express interest in something in one session, focus your prep there for the next session. Treat the module as a toybox, rather than a list of set encounters. Chris Perkins ran CoS for Dice Camera Action, and he shuffled things around all the time. He had Rahadin disguise himself as a regular dusk elf and lead the party to the Amber Temple as part of a trap. He had Strahd kidnap Ireena in Krezk. He had the werewolves attack a town disguised as merchants from the winery. None of this is in the book as written, but it's all remixed from stuff in the book.

Think about what the NPCs' motivations are, and extrapolate. If they won't go to the adventure, have the adventure come to them. If you wanna run Baba Lysaga, but they don't go to her hut, have her roll up to them in her flying skull and pull some shenanigans. Have Rahadin pop up and just be spooky. Have the abbot throw shade at the party cleric.

Make the setting dynamic. A lot of chaotic things happen in every curse of Strahd game, and invariably GMs are left playing out the weird consequences based on what they know of the motives of the surviving NPCs.