If they also insist on the game being a do anything sandbox,
something has to give.
But, thats also why the other option is pursuing a true emergent narrative system, rather than the kinda-sorta thing that results from slapping a conventional literary or film plot into whats otherwise a sandbox.
This is a solution I've been looking into in
my game.
The issue is that traditional stories don't work in interactive environments; games are about doing, not being a passive audience.
Thats the reason most video games that try to force a story through the game could just as easily done their story as a movie with nothing lost. The "story" is just movie scenes inbetween disconnected bouts of unrelated gameplay.
Meanwhile, games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, the Sims, and others are ones that go the other way, allowing story's to truly emerge from gameplay, and many others unlike those are heavily conducive to the same on a smaller scale, like DayZ or Bannerlord. They aren't stories that are even remotely similar to conventional narratives we see in movies or books, but thats okay, because games are a different medium.
The latter is more of what RPGs should be playing like, if we want to hold up the idea that they're games where you can do "anything".
As said, there's two choices. Either we go for an actual sandbox, which means players need to adjust their expectations, or we accept the idea that RPGs aren't games where anything can be done, and so the design and the players need to follow that assumption.
We can't have it both ways.