You can still have a linear and driven plot, while having an "open" design. I fully believe that. Not that it takes away from what you're saying, I do appreciate the insight.
It is possible, early Zelda games were very close to that.
Since you're saying the game progresses linearly and the "openness" only comes from being able to walk straight to the end game area from the starting zone (and die), then make sure you do not create, or anyway minimize the presence of, any "too early" locations.
These places are areas which are obviously built to be scenery for an important event, like a cutscene or a gimmick for a boss, so the player is naturally lead to think it's a place worthy of exploring; unfortunately, since the boss battle or whatever has yet to come, maybe because it's the actual ending, there is nothing but some generic monsters.
These areas are always a massive waste of time since they provide absolutely nothing and it's especially bad if it's possible to reach them before the player has fast travel, since backtracking can require even more time than to get to the place at all.
Plus, knowing how to reach these zones is not useful either: since there's supposed to be plot development of some kind right there, at some point in time the player would learn how to go there anyway, making the whole exploration useless.
How to reduce the waste impact of these areas depend on the game itself, like plot elements, gameplay and so on, but usually you can remove the biggest offenders with these following rules and take care of the more subtle ones on a case by case basis.
At worst, these places can simply be cut off from the map until needed: just make a cutscene showing that a bridge has been built, a wall has collapsed or only certain vehicles can reach them. It goes against the open world set up, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Alternatively, make sure the rewards are good. For example, you can take the closest "early game" location from the area, see which resources (items, monsters, etc.) are available there and drop the "next stage of strength" resources there. With a more practical example: if slimes are ranked in strength using the colors red, green, blue, if the closest zone has red slimes then the area will have green or even blue slimes. Supposedly, this will give the player resources that would help during early game as long as she/he manages to defeat the enemies.
Finally, but this is a difficult to use option, simply recycle areas and never let the player access these places without showing a cutscene or have a boss battle. Overusing it ends up generating too much backtracking (I go north, do stuff, but the boss is in the south where I came from, but then I need to go to the north again for the next cutscene...) and having dedicated places for each boss is not too different from the first option. Still, when used properly it is an immense help in world building and you should seriously consider it.
If you want to have have references for these "too early areas" so that you can avoid them, play Zelda Breath of the Wild. That game is filled with those and every time I ended up in one it had been nothing but a massive waste of time and in-game resources: the first for obvious reason (I had to walk up there in the first place), the second because whatever I found there was never enough to replenish what I used to not die along the way.