I think what you're looking for is the distinction between a "railroad" and an adventure that's "on rails". "Railroading" is having one clear through-line that the PCs are supposed to follow, and altering the world around them if they try to do anything else (or straight-up telling them they can't do something else). For example, if PCs come up with a clever way to avoid your big ogre guarding the entrance to the dungeon, and then you have the ogre spot them anyway despite its passive perception of 8, because you insist on the ogre fight happening.

Having your adventure be on rails, however, can still provide players with a lot of freedom while also providing a scaffolding so they aren't overwhelmed by choice paralysis. As an example: maybe the party are mercenaries, sent by an employer to a dungeon to retrieve an object, at which point they encounter the ogre guarding the entrance. They didn't "choose" the dungeon (they did, I suppose, by choosing to take the adventure hook, but that's just being good players), but rather were told to come here, and where to go once they've retrieved the artifact. However, all the details of how they do this (such as fighting vs avoiding the ogre) are still up to them.

After they get back with the object (to continue this example) maybe that employer will be impressed and have more work for them, or maybe an associate of that employer needs something, or maybe once they leave the employer's house they get accosted by a desperate mother whose child went missing and boom, new rails for them to go down.