That’s totally fair (though I haven’t played any recent Zelda games, so I can’t speak to that). I actually think quite a few recent open world games didn’t need to be open world at all and would have been better if they were more of a single player guided narrative.

One game that did this perfectly IMO was Guardians of the Galaxy. It wasn’t open world, but you could explore each “chapter” or “level” or whatever as much as you wanted and could replay them individually. That made the whole story feel really tight, coherent, and well thought out. I find myself really wanting that format in some of these big beautiful (and yeah, often boring) open world games.