I see your point. I remember how at some point was disenchanted with Paradox games because of similar things. But it’s not a bad thing. Yes, you can use a relatively superfluous strategy, just eat everyone small around you. But this way you’ll only get so far. Eventually, you see that a lot of mechanics are already aimed at making an expansion for expansion’s sake not optimal. Granted, having an additional land is always good (even if you get some rebellious and contested lands it’s almost worth it) but spending time on wrong expansion limits you.
In thoughtful strategy game, there’s no tall or wide strategy per se, there’s a variety of uses for your resources. There are factions that are considered to be “wide”. Like Muscowy (or any other Russian principality uniting Russian lands) gets a natural way of expanding into Northern Asia: it’s full of hordes that you want to beat anyway cause they won’t ever be good allies to you, and the trade “flows” from Siberia into Novgorod so expanding there is natural. But at the same time Russia is ill-suited for expanding into Europe: this land is much better but Europeans will almost always be more developed than Russians for the first half of the game; it’s easy to befreind and Royal Marry many of them fellow Christian nations; even if you capture those lands they aren’t integrated into Russian trade system - to get proper benefits you’ll have to move your capital or Trade Capital into Europe and this will devaluate your core Russian lands. If you play something like England then trade winds bring ships from America, Africa and Asia to you. Conquering, say, Baltics or Germany or Italy gains almost nothing to you. You can say that England has to play “tall” but in reality it means that its situation doesn’t provide natural expansion: you conquer Scotland and Ireland just because you don’t want them allying some foreign powers and attacking you, but then you heavily develop your isles letting them get great benefits from trade, and then you very deliberately colonize and buy land around the world just to support trade routes bringing you money. Later your core lands become so advanced that conquering whole foreign countries in India or China becomes viable and natural and then you might call your playstyle wide. But you still will rarely have any reason to get any land in Europe cause it means directly competing with other powerful nations for the land that worth much more to them than to you.
So of course if you’re skilled and experienced player you can conquer the world as any nation (but so you can in Crusader Kings 2). Your point is probably that you’re pushed into the expansionist mindset. And I say it’s fine. Those missions and events give context to your expansion. Economic system makes expansion much more thoughtful than it seems.