Personally, I think the issue was that the Zelda formula had grown stale. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword were both aggressively mediocre entries in the series, and you had to go back to Wind Waker, which came out in 2002, to find a truly amazing Zelda experience on a console.
Breath of the Wild did toss out some stuff I loved about Zelda, namely the tight dungeon design, but completely reinvented the series and pushed the open world genre forward. Elden Ring isn’t as good as it was without the ideas it borrowed from BotW.
There were things I disliked, such as weapon durability. The issue I had is that degrading weapons discouraged you from using your best weapons, and also from picking fights with weaker enemies, as you’d just break decent weapons and be rewarded with shittier ones. Also, traversal was fun at first, but could become tedious, and it was infuriating when it started raining mid-climb and just completely fucked you over.
Tears of the Kingdom mostly fixes those two issues. The fuse ability lets you turn any low level weapon into something decent, and all the monster parts you collect from fallen enemies can be fused to weapons or arrows to make them more powerful, or add elemental effects. Ascend also makes traversal quicker and easier, along with the ability to fuse things to your shield to give you some quick air time.