They just need to go back to original idea for Zelda. And no, this formula is not that.
Initial Zelda design was labyrinths (dungeons) that player accesses from main screen - think something like Demon's Souls in modern terms.
Then Miyamoto decided he wanted for players to go around and have freedom to explore (and he was into Ultima at the time), so he decided to add overworld.
Then their coder fucked up something while translating overworld from paper to actual code and ended up with only half of it - and Miyamoto decided that game is actually better that way, cause overworld he designed on paper was too big. Plus this gave them opportunity to include Second quest.
Add to this nature of the game, which is actually semi-open (or gated, whichever you prefer) given that you need certain things to progress further.
As mental exercise try to clean your mind of BotW/TotK and try to imagine that game with modern tech and some other narrative/gameplay improvements, both from Zelda's history and video game RPG history.
Yeah, there is A LOT of room for improvements.