Yes, but only at what I might call an intermediate level.
So the immediate tactical situation is not going to be “this room is in stasis until the door is booted down” (unless that’s literally what’s going on). But the slightly larger situation might well be “the bandits raid outlying farms, and the farmers try ineffectively to fight them off”, and that might be stable in the sense that sometimes the bandits win, sometimes they lose, but neither side makes much progress (until a confounding factor comes along).
And then at a higher level again, fates of nations, much more usually there is a process going on and the PCs can shove at it to try to change its course and speed; in my mind that’s more common than an equilibrium.
(I recently read Suzanne Palmer’s Finder, which has a five-sided political situation in the process of becoming unstable – but one of the destabilising factors is our hero, a spaceship repo man, even before he does anything. Because even if the ship weren’t important to one of the faction leaders’ power, that person would lose face by having it taken away from him, therefore he acts prematurely to try to consolidate his power before it happens.)
But getting back to the idea of pushing to reach particular story points, I often have some idea in advance of what a climactic scene might look like, but there will be many ways of getting there, and if it doesn’t happen at all then I’ll just put those bits away and use them on some later occasion. Which isn’t to say there’s no direction coming out of the GM’s mind, because many NPCs have their own ideas about what they want to happen, and they will be using their own resources to try to make sure that it does. But they don’t have privileged access to the machinery of the world any more than the PCs do.
I think there is such a thing as a rules-bound style of play, in which it is a normal and accepted thing that if a rule definitively states what happens it’s regarded as an abuse of GM power to make something else happen instead. Those of us who read the SJGames forums will have seen this worldview in people who are trying out GURPS having played, most often, D&D/Pathfinder, games with significant organised-play and tournament scenes, where one can see that consistency of ruling in the same adventure across multiple GMs could be highly valued. I contrast GURPS which is a “rule zero” game, a term with a muddled history but which seems to mean something like “have fun and ignore any rule that gets in the way”.
I have met players who feel that the rules intrinsically represent the reality of the game world (this seems to be well-correlated with players of rules-bound games) and therefore want to apply them to all situations, and that can certainly work against both story and a sense of reality as distinct from the rules.
When I play an explicitly story-focused game, this works against what I call “immersion”, the state of mind in which I’m running a simulation of my PC and reacting to the situation as they’d react. Systems that they don’t have access to in world, but I as a player do, shake that sense and cause me to step back from “being this person” to “writing this person”. (This includes things like “now narrate how that attempt failed”.) Oddly, although Genesys does a bit of this, it doesn’t throw me in the same way. As a GM I try to run multiple processes, some of which are immersive simulations of key NPCs, some of which are more general simulations (e.g. “how the base personnel are reacting to an intruder alert”), and some of which deal with the overall progress of the adventure.
