Example; the Legend of Zelda: BotW and TotK weapon degradation system. At first I was annoyed at it, but once I stopped caring about my “favorite weapon” I really started to enjoy the system. I think it lends really well to the sandbox nature of the game and it itches that resourcefulness nature inside me.
I think if you’re comparing open world games to open world games then yeah, BOTW doesn’t do anything too terribl differenty, but when you compare BOTW to other Zelda games then it’s very different and that’s where the criticism comes from.
Personally I feel BOTW is a very competent open world game, probably one of the better ones I’ve played but I still didn’t gel with it because I was already strongly feeling fatigued from too many games becoming open world and not making that leap particularly well (Mass Effect Andromeda and FFXV coming to mind for me personally), what I wanted was a more traditional Zelda game and that’s simply not what BOTW was.