here we call it the deer - headlight problem. why doesn't the deer dodge? because it's a novel situation, he's under pressure to understand and there's no frame of reference for instincts to take over

same with non driven users (users that aren't doing a specific job) having a novel interface, they don't know which operations and options are irreversibile and so get frozen trying to understand everything the computers tells them at once and once they're overwhelmed they just get stuck

giving UX air is a good catchall that both forces you to parcel only what's important for your user and help user not getting overwhelmed by options

a more detailed advice would be to present branching decisions in order of commitment and only showing the relevant options at each step, but more whitespace is a good rule of thumb because it forces you into wizards without becoming a mouthful like this one, and gives you enough agency to come up with alternatives design to wizards of you can get by with other representations of the data to be manipulated