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In short, your advice sounds really cool and intelligent if you take it in isolation. Yes, I agree that I shouldn't put ">[1] Shoot yourself in the head" on the vote slate if I don't want the MC to shoot herself in the head. That's why, when I did put that on the slate, I did want her to shoot herself in the head, and everybody voted for it. I too have taken QMing 101, and that's why no individual choice I offered would've derailed the story on its own**.
I think the advice falls apart when, rather than targeting specific story-derailing possibilities, you blanket-apply it to any negative possibility anywhere (which is what I would've needed to do to ensure the players didn't keep picking them). If I stripped every suboptimal option from every slate to guarantee the players experienced the story exactly how I intended, there's a word for that. It's called "railroading." Or "writing a novel." If I only stripped the suboptimal options I knew for certain the players would pick, leaving the rest, that's called "being psychic." And I'm not.
Now, instead of forcing hands OOC and limiting player agency***, a good QMing move would've been to introduce a way to naturally, IC steer you guys away from your worse impulses. Such as by having a character around who would do that. Conveniently, that is the path I suggested, because I've thought about this a lot, I've thought about good QMing practices a lot, I've heard all the QMing 101 advice a thousand times, and I've been doing this for nearly six years. I'm not perfect and I never will be. I'll never run a perfect thread or a perfect quest. This arc was messy and roughly paced, but it was messy and roughly paced because of direct player input, predictable consequences of actions, and dice rolls nobody can control. And all of that's okay. It's questing. It's kind of the fundamental essence of questing, rolling with the punches, working with what you have. And I'm happy with the end result, and the players appear reasonably satisfied, and it wrapped up well enough. So thank you for the advice, but I think I'm okay.
*I can discuss this in much greater detail if anybody cares; if nobody cares you're gonna have to trust me
**Even the one I retroactively vetoed wouldn't have derailed the story on its own-- it wasn't an intrinsically bad option. If you hadn't previously spent two threads goofing up, it would've been fine. I vetoed only because it happened to be the point where I hit a wall.
***Yes, I believe players should have the agency to suck donkey balls
