the.com/choke point

means A narrow passage or junction so critical that whoever controls it controls the flow of everything trying to get through it.

from Military and naval language first — a literal narrow strait, mountain pass, or river crossing where an army or fleet could be bottlenecked and ambushed, like Thermopylae. 'Choke' here keeps its plain sense of constricting a passage to a trickle, the way a hand closes around a throat. The term later widened into logistics, computing, and economics to describe any single point — a server, a shipping lane, a supplier — where traffic narrows enough that controlling it means controlling everything behind it.