A big part of what we seem to be discussing is the subtlety with which agendas of play are presented and carried out, whether in reference to the explicit ones that are so definitive to games like BITD and DW, or to the implicit ones of any other game.
My experience of Story Now games are that they certainly instruct you (the GM) to add to the fiction (in ways that don't contradict previously established fiction) in order to complicate the lives of team PC on a moment to moment basis, especially on failed rolls. Done with insufficient GM skill will absolutely create a scenario where the players will feel as though the story itself is choking them in this way. In Masks at least, the agendas concerning being a fan of the player characters, and the advice about not doing too many hard moves, as well about pacing, are framed as devices to help the GM not do that. This is of course, also the case outside of Story Now play, a DND GM that adds monsters that weren't there before into the area the players escape to because that GM is trying to keep their players in hot water can do the same. Its literally a question of pacing, tension, and basic scenario design whether the players are having too much pressure applied to them.
The difference is that Story Now games approach this question from an aspect of reminding the GM that allowing the tension to release and players to have their victory is their job, with some aids. DND and other games more like it, handle this by framing the GM as a game designer, and then teaching them how to create scenarios where this will naturally occur (once players have overcome the challenges, they are victorious and the tension naturally releases.) This requires the GM to learn two stances, and transition between them-- a designer stance where they engage in level and scenario design, and referee stance where they 'run' the content they've created. Reading GM facing material outlines the guidelines and tools for both. But there's also, I'm conjecturing, essentially a third 'Director' stance that hybridizes the two stances so design can take place during what would otherwise be referee stance, and GMs dip their toe into it to greater or lesser degrees in traditional games.
If you've ever been playing DND, and decided to add monsters, or subtract monsters to adjust the pacing and tension of the adventure during play, that's Director Stance. I would argue that in many ways Story Now GMs live in Director Stance, and that's what the system of moves (as it relates to GMing) is actually codifying. The way Agendas are presented are the things that they are using their moves to try and achieve, the right balance where the fiction is believable (according to genre norms and the table's tastes), where players feel they have agency, and where interesting things happen everyone explores together.
The controversy of Director Stance, is that since the ideal is to play to find out what happens, for everyone including the GM, the idea that what happens would be curated in this way is a naturally occurring tension that BITD (the system I've been recently reading in spare hours in preparation to eventually run it a bit) resolves by disclaiming some of those decisions to the players so that no one holds all the cards, making the result intrinsically emergent. I'm speaking of the 'Judgement Calls' section of the rules, where players get to decide whether a solution to a problem is reasonable, while the GM determines what the problems for them to solve are. In what's being referred to as GSP (and probably in my more lenient variety of SP that includes character optimization and such) the GM has the final say of whether the solution is reasonable (although in most cases, the rules provide an authority for the players and GM to defer to, which is a soft restriction on the GM's own ability to Calvinball.)
In both cases, there is an effort being made by the rules which parcel out responsibility to the participants to convey the proper mindset that responsibility should be approached with. For example, players in BITD could certainly decide that seducing a regular non-magical door into opening with gentle caresses is a reasonable approach, but they wouldn't because it would break the rules of the shared fiction and damage the tone of the game they're striving for. They have the power to Calvinball, to an extent, but a sense of how that power is to be used that Calvinball lacks. Meanwhile in DND, the GM certainly could drop a random army of Dragons on low level players for guaranteed TPK, but they're told their job is designing an engaging scenario so again, the power to Calvinball with instructions that you shouldn't (which are implicit in the encounter design rules, and often explicit in GM facing material.)
GSP/SP seems to be the intersection of a well designed scenario adjudicated fairly, with the choices of players within that context that creates an environment rich with agency and consequences from that agency that follow a logical progression. Director Stance empowers the GM to 'break' this by performing ad-hoc modifications to the scenario that could but don't have to strain the intrinsic 'competitive integrity' that was built into it if Designer Stance was performed correctly. Its a powerful tool that allows the GM to fix mistakes made in Designer Stance, but its powerful enough to break the game if they misuse it to say, preserve tension that the players 'fairly' earned the resolution of.
Judgement Calls in BITD give players some of that same power to damage the 'natural' integrity of the scenario with unrealistic solutions to problems, while allowing them to make the imaginary space even more 'fair' by checking the GM's power to Calvinball them by insisting to the GM that a fair solution to a problem, is indeed fair.
The real controversy here, is probably down to how much you trust PCs in the abstract, not to Calvinball you with that power. For some, the need to use every resource at hand to win would pollute their use of that responsibility, while for others their sense of duty to the quality of the fiction itself would stay their hand. DND doesn't really care in the same way, because the only person with the power to Calvinball has no motivation to do so, since they aren't trying to win in the first place, just create an engaging scenario, Calvinball would be antithetical to their goals unless they've convinced themselves that 'fairness' doesn't matter, which is how we get some forms of railroading where the GM Calvinballs the players out of the logical consequences of their actions in a way that is both insistent and obvious.
