Thanks for the feedback :)
I am starting to see that I didn't quite communicate it well enough, but I had meant for the doors to be a risk-reward decision. Do you take a temporary setback to open the permanent shortcut, or do you continue on without a safety net? Like a reverse of Shovel Knight's breakable checkpoints. So the way you played was one of the intended options.
In hindsight though, I think there are a number of reasons they don't quite work, so they'll likely just be regular unlockable doors in the post jam version, lol