Well, the problem with the glitches I was thinking of was basically:

-You have to play a worse version of the game. This was a majora's mask glitch. It relied on a bug that allowed you to "wrong warp" to the Japanese Debug Menu. The problem was basically it required you to increment a hidden index to over 8000. Which crashed the N64 version. The second issue is the debug menu requires the directional pad, which isn't mapped correctly on the Wii version. Which basically meant playing on the Wii U version which has input lag among other issues that make it...not very fun to play when speed running. Basically it doesn't play right.

-The other was an RNG glitch in Ocarina of Time. It worked on trying to get a bottle by the deku tree, which allowed you to do a very broken glitch that brought you right to Ganon to fight the final boss. The problem with that one is that it required you to trigger a pickup sequence in a specific way that allowed an enemy to knock you out of it. The only enemy drop that does this is the first deku seed of the game, and the enemies that were found using this method...had a low rate of dropping the deku seed. In theory it was the fastest run at the time, but on it's first showcase it went over the allotted time because the seeds didn't drop correctly until 30m into the run.

So in one case you had to use a version of the game that played awful to increment a hidden table 8000 times. And in another case you had to hope glitch went off without a hitch or you started over.