I guess the consensus here is to always have some form of immediate, tactile feedback or a cue
Imo, the best but often trickiest solution is just to have the map's flow guide you to where you need to be, be it by making the area where the door is advantageous in some way (monster encounter pressures you to use corners and bottlenecking, or having a large stash of resources that can't all be used at once be there) or by giving the player a new insight (imagery that evokes your goal, for example; All stuff that's been explained here by people way more talented than me lol)
tl;dr the player should progress as they play, because being driven by gameplay is more intuitive than only playing after you progress, so to speak