Don't have degradable weapons, you can incentivize variety of combat/gameplay with new and interesting challenges, rather than breaking half a players items in one fight, a system that makes players actively avoid combat scenarios as much as possible when that's supposed to be what you're playing the game for in the first place. Don't force the user into pausing over and over in every single combat encounter, and don't throw all balance completely out the window by allowing players to restore health and stamina almost endlessly during that paused state. Don't limit simple things like running and swimming with a painfully shallow stamina meter, when you don't even apply these same limits to combat you run 20 ft and are just done with life, and yet you can do large horizontal dodges and backflip 20ft into the air infinitely. Don't lazily make the map completely empty without giving users the OPTION of filling it out, I saw countless people praise this fact, complaining about the density of other game's maps, completely ignoring the fact that those hints were optional in those other titles, you never had to use them, and in this you have zero choice on the matter, you MUST reference external sources if you want any chance of completion in a reasonable time-frame.

"Breath of the Wild treats its audience with a respect that few open-world games ever do these days."

Do I need to link all of the videos of people scanning in Amiibos for mountains of free shit, basically blatantly cheating in a way that the game 100% does not allow otherwise, but does peculiarly AFTER the user has shelled out hundreds of dollars on shitty toys.

Zelda does some really cool things and it has a genuinely shocking amount of stuff crammed into it, but it's also filled with shortsighted mechanics (dozens that I didn't mention) and blatant disrespect of the consumer, so no, DO NOT use that game as the guidebook for the genre.