More recently Stellaris gives you three topics to research at once, but you're limited to about 3-5 choices (there are ways to increase the number of choices) in each category. Those choices are weighted to appear based on how rare / expensive the tech is and the area of interest of the scientist researching that area. There are also gameplay elements which impact the choices you're presented with, like for example if you have a gateway in a solar system you own (think stargate), then you're more likely to get an option for the tech for building stargates. It works pretty well.
I thought it was an interesting idea but it seems fundamentally incompatible with having a tech tree at all.
Are there any modern 4x “lite” type games like this?
The game also completely broke this approach by including a racial attribute that guaranteed you discovery of every technology at each level - "creative". You could stack population growth and the Creative stat and pay for them with minor downgrades in other nonessential characteristics (e.g. ship dodge % or spying effectiveness %). The resulting race would have stupidly advanced ships and the economy to support them very early in the game, which usually leads to a total stomp as you just roll over the local enemies and claim a large chunk of the galaxy map as your own, turtling until the endgame.
I liked the one in the old Stars! game where you invest in broad categories (chemistry, biology, etc...) and tech would unlock at a combination of tech levels. A better laser might be electronics 4, metallurgy 2 for example.