That was an issue with Breath of the Wild; the scope of the world is way larger than the scope of the game, so there’s lots of big open empty fields with the occasional collection of slight variations of the same half dozen monsters, and the only thing you will encounter during your adventures are a korok “puzzle” or a shrine. maybe a memory.
I will give Nintendo this: they listened to their fans. Zelda players sometime around Twilight Princess started bemoaning how linear Zelda games have become and the inability to sequence break and wanted more non-linear Zelda games. So they made a non-linear game. And Nintendo, being Japanese and thus congenitally incapable of doing anything halfway, made a game so aggressively open world that it will hold you down, squat over your face and non-linear in your mouth and nose.
They went through so much trouble to make the game as non-linear as possible that - whenever a character lists the four divine beasts, the old or new champions, their races, villages, or biomes therein - it’s never done in the same order twice so as not to suggest a canon completion order.
This prevented them from doing big sweeping stories like the one in Twilight Princess because events could happen out of order or not at all, so the story takes place 100 years in the past and you find out details of it out of order.
Tears of the Kingdom is simply not as good. The story is even thinner on the ground to the point of feeling lazy; the champions plagiarized each other’s cut scenes. It’s outright inconsistent with previous lore, so that’s just a big fuck you to long-term fans of the series. And even if there is a slightly bigger variety in monster types and whatnot, it’s spread across a MUCH larger play area and the sky and depths are full of…mostly nothing.
It feels like every idea anyone suggested during development ended up in the game. There’s not one but two new crafting systems along with the new rune mechanics, and none of it gets a change to breathe. They had enough ideas here to make two games, one that explores the vehicle/robot building mechanics, and one that explores the weapon fusing. Maybe have one feature the sky, and one that features the depths. But no, TotK is a mile wide and an inch deep.