A prominent example is the Honorverse series or Star Wars, another one is Stellaris when using wormholes.
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7) Increase advantage for the defender sufficiently.
However, those change assumptions about the setting.
Star Wars gives an advantage to the defender -
planetary shields. A protected planet may be easy to blockade if you have enough of fast ships to intercept transports, yet it's hard to take or bomb without either ludicrous firepower (Death Star) or sabotage.
Ultimately, incremental advance vs. single battle issue is down to whether you can be sure you will win in a single all-out battle without collapsing immediately after (to a third party, or internal pressure).
If you choose small steps, geometry suggests to not leave anything hostile behind your back.
In practice, it's just the opposite. Many truisms of superior numbers go out the window when it comes to air combat. If the enemy swarms in with a ponderous formation of a hundred planes, the appropriate counter isn't a hundred-and-one. Instead, the counter is a very small formation, which can swing sneakily into place and ambush the enemy, confident that every dot is a valid target. Then they fly away while the next group of your planes is lining up for another ambush. Having a lot of guys in a formation is actually a disadvantage.
Another was to concentrate a lot of AA fire in the right place. If you know where. Between this and moving the idea of artillery preparation into air, someone figured out that it may help to launch a bunch of frag rockets, then rip in before the other guys changed formation, or even figured out who is down. The more targets are packed, the more damage, of course.
The point is, this wasn't an entirely new weapon, and it was still very inaccurate and thus very circumstantial - yet it gave an impressive edge. There always can be advantages formidable in specific conditions, but nearly useless in a slightly different scenario.
Point 7 is important because you want long range raiders, but not long range attacks. So, you should make major attacks difficult. Maybe they need a long and difficult siege.
Another part of it is cost disparity: the defender's assets
already are where they will be needed. To protect a small area (space around a planet), one doesn't need "proper" FTL capable ships. Which at very least means system defence ship frees space and cost of one major system.
Or maybe even cheaper than system ships. Even without "true" stealth, the attackers may face lots of orbital objects from stations so big FTL for them would be prohibitively expensive and down to junk and asteroids, some of which may pack enough heat to ruin a ship's whole day, and you can't tell which until too late. Space equivalent of fortifications and minefields.
Sure, they can be peeled off, but this will take some time and meanwhile the defender calls for reinforcements (if the attacker brought moderate fleet, it will be overpowered) and/or retaliation raids (attacker's own transport and some orbital assets will burn, unless they left behind enough forces to defend those). The possibility of raiding also means you want to eliminate the best staging bases of enemy counter-attacks - those are their bases closest to your assets.
Cut the enemy communications, and don't extend yours where they will be cut.
If there are no distinct paths to cut, go for the closest enemy bases first and capture the closest assets first, because this way the time they'll need to attack you increases more than the time you'll need to move reinforcement in case of an attack.
Also, if they can detect you passing by, you want to eliminate one of the nearest, rather than skip to the next target - their detection posts or patrols would issue early warning. If they don't, and you have the same capabilities, can you be sure what forces they have here or there, or inbound for resupply the next day?
