It took a lot of things that the franchise was known for and popped them into an open world game built on the backs of games like Skyrim and Dragon's Dogma and nostalgia did the rest. The number one thing the game is credited for is freedom - that you can run straight to the end boss as though that's a unique gameplay twist (it's not, Morrowind has this) and a not completely pointless gimmick which essentially says '95% of our game is optional content, neat right?'. It wasn't neat, the world was too large and empty and the finds became all too familiar.
Every other open world games get' chastised for respawning bandit camps with pointless rewards, with BotW, no one cared because 'you can also use stealth and steal their weapons' (like we all did in WIndwaker, a decade prior). 'What's over that hill' fast became 'over that hill there's a shrine, some Bokoblins, a Korok puzzle and a high-level spear that I'll have to sort through my inventory to make room for'.
Don't get me wrong, I had fun, but there were many flaws in that game that people chose to ignore.
You could do this in Morrowind, though, twenty years ago and they actually managed to combine that breath taking innovation with a cogent narrative that you could follow if you liked. You could also go nab Keening and Sunder and run straight to the end if you felt like it (though why anyone would consider that to be a genuinely good feature I have no idea). They even managed to get some world building in there so that not every NPC opens their dialogue by saying "100 YEARS AGO..." as though literally nothing had happened to anyone worthy of any note in a whole century. Moreover, Bethesda managed to do that on far weaker hardware than the Switch.