Ideas are easy. Ideas for an interesting character, a riveting action scene, a strong piece of dialogue. Story Ideas are hard.
What you do need, is three things. If you don't have these, then there is no story. A BME, a beginning, a middle and an end.
I get my ideas from a lot of strange places. I subscribe to a lot of science and archeology newsletters. Many of the articles provide the fuel my imagination needs to spark that next creative step. I remember watching some YouTube music videos and saw a remix of Wicked Game by Chris Isaacs performed by Ursine Vulpine.
Not only was the remix an emotional take on the origional piece, the still image used was a perfect fit. A genesis of an idea came to me and it took about 24 hours for me to collect some mental dot-points for a few hero scenes that gave me the push that I needed. I started out on what was to become my first story, I had a beginning, a hazy idea of what the middle might look like and no idea of an ending.
I didn't have a story, I only had an idea.
Ideas are great. They are the seeds of stories, but without a BME, that's all you have. An idea.
It may be the best story idea in the world but without that structure, then you'll fizzle out when you come to write it.
I started again and in dot point, worked out some progression and a sort of ending and even wrote an epilogue.
I've been more disciplined since then and (more or less) followed the trail of breadcrumb dot points that lead me though the story.

Why does it matter? If the story is flowing okay, staying on track may not seem all that important. What kills you is the editing.
You have broken promises scattered throughout your story and it leaves your readers confused at best, frustrated and disappointed at worst.

I'm a plantser, some dot point planning, some more detail in the key scenes and generally pantsing the rest.
The difference is that when the idea and the moment grabs me by the collar, dragging me forward in the story at a breakneck pace, any detailed planning tends to be swept aside. The story unravelling in my head is like I'm the only patron in an darkened empty cinema watching a brilliant [coff] movie unfold before my eyes.
The immersion is almost overwhelming and the emotional state you experience reflects the scene that you are writing.

I don't consciously do either. My belief is that a story should be true to its setting. If you start adding things that don't fit the setting for the sake of catering to a very small fringe audience then you do you. I can't be bothered.

The modern thought on writing is that men and women should be written the same. At the core I generally agree, but at the peripheries they are not. Women and men can react quite differently to specific situations. If either gender puts their hand on a hot surface, they will react in much the same way. Placed in a complex situations, the outcomes can be remarkably different. Cultural, social or combative This is adaptive evolution in our species and it can be seen in a multitude of other species across the globe.