The way system path nodes aren't strict. The engine will always try to make the character take the most direct path from the starting destination to the target destination, which tends to be a straight line unless you have cutouts inside of the way border that prevents the character from doing that.
Way paths are mostly used for scaling & also to calculate the nearest path node when clicking outside of the way border. If there's no way system path nodes (or there aren't enough) then the engine will most likely not be able to automatically calculate the nearest destination position to where the player click & thus the will probably end up not walking anywhere.
As for scaling outside of the way system, it's something that was recommended to me ages ago & it's something that I recommend often to other people on our discord server. The reason for scaling outside instead of inside is that it's best to scale on the Y-axis (vertical) only if possible, as it's smoother than horizontal scaling. Any way point path nodes inside of the way border should be left with a scaling value of -1 to prevent them from affecting the current scale.
Out of curiosity why do you want this feature? Only you will know where the way borders are, whereas the player will probably just think there's some weird bug with the game because they might think left click is not always working when they click somewhere.
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