There’s a lot of confusion out there about what the critical path on a project is. The definition you learned when you were first exposed to construction scheduling on a job site might not hold true today.
Today the critical path should be defined as the longest path of activities that forecasts when the project will finish. While you’ll often hear a lot of other definitions out there, many of these are based on ideology that came before the critical path method (CPM) software packages we now use.