There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game. Put in a patent application. Abandon it. Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art". Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives. Also leave subtle but important details o…
What you describe is the standard in some industries. If a research team discovers something new, lawyers will make a patent out of it that is broad / vague enough to prevent any further research in that area by competitors. At the same time they look at the patents of competitors and if they are too specific they try to patent similar ideas.
Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.
All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).
The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.