I had the opposite experience running around though, it felt very satisfying to just go "what's that over there" and run into totally skippable content like dragons, simple korok seed puzles, tracking down shooting stars landing in enemy territory, finding and riding the lord of the mountain, watching enemy bokoblins try to hunt a wild boar, solving the puzzle of how to get a shrine to appear, snowboarding, landing on a far away island and taking down the slumbering cyclops that rules it, goron golfing with giant rocks, etc etc. It's like a big yard where you can go anywhere and there is something delightful tucked in everywhere.
I think the sparsity of people is deliberate, it's post apocalyptic where most travelers you encounter are probably assassins from an enemy cult.
In general I felt like it was the result of a very different game approach than something like cyberpunk, where they added small things to the game one by one while making sure they meshed and were polished to a mirror finish.
The shrine decorations are monotonous but some of the puzzles are absolutely fantastic.
The one in the Korok forest where you have to figure out the relationship between the star map and the stones took me a long time and felt so satisfying to complete.
The game is polarising because it works only for a certain kind of player. I love just jumping in a random point of the map to chill and explore and suddenly find some surprise in the middle of nowhere, but if you prefer some linear and story-driven game I don't think BOTW is for you.
I enjoyed the shrines, but not many of them were hard once you realized that they all follow a Chekhov's gun pattern. Anything given must be used in the solution, anything that reacts to one of your skills (magnet, etc) must be important.
I think the sparsity of people is deliberate, it's post apocalyptic where most travelers you encounter are probably assassins from an enemy cult.
In general I felt like it was the result of a very different game approach than something like cyberpunk, where they added small things to the game one by one while making sure they meshed and were polished to a mirror finish.