I made up these phrases to give a simple explanation instead of causal inference terms, and they are probably not good terms, so sorry for the confusion. If I describe it in more standard vocabulary, 'at any of those instances' refer to doing interventions (such as randomized controlled trials).

'causal path' refers to a path in a directed acyclic graph that models the causality. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggdag/vignettes/intr... has some examples.