Honestly I've been expecting Russia to chose this strategy because they've been using it again and again since previous invasions above 2000. Rather, I'll be surprised if Russia didn't choose this strategy.
Regarding the nature of the conflict itself tho.
There were many speculations, people mostly took lessons learned from previous Russian wars in recent decades in an attempt to guess the Russian strategy. First in mind is the 2008 Georgian War, Russia launched extensive cyberattacks on Georgia to shut down all communication lines in the build-up towards their invasion. Then you have the little green man unconventional operation in the Crimean annexation, that thing caught everyone off guard, so much so that nobody has any idea what to do with them. A bit minor development is probably the use of PMC and non-conventional units, namely Wagner group and various militias Russia supported in Ukraine and elsewhere, people would expect it will be another proxy war or unconventional warfare like in the Middle East.
But none of these is what we see here in the Ukraine invasion. There is no such emphasis on cyberattacks like what we saw in Georgia, as there are many videos from Ukraine that got circulated, so the electricity and communication line is still working. Then, Russia freaking deploys everything, 150.000 troops, to operate in full-scale conventional warfare. So all the speculation about non-conventional warfare got thrown out of the window, it is nothing like whatever the Americans were doing in Afghanistan.
Is conventional warfare back on the menu? Ironically, the US retreat from Afghanistan might be the symbolic end of the era of insurgency warfare, and this Ukraine war the return of conventional war in the modern era.