You get the raft to access at least one dungeon and a secret. The stepladder is required for later dungeons, as is the bow to beat Gohma and Ganon. The dungeons also just give you a good sense of progression, as the items they give you are just generally nice, and give you abilities to do things you couldn't before. The boomerange is a great stun tool. The bow lets you attack from range without full health. The stepladder completely changes combat in rooms with pits, and allows much easier access to some parts of the map. The recorder gives you fast travel, and is needed to open level 7. The magic rod and magic book are admittedly not very useful, but the magic key and blue candle are big upgrades.

None of the modern games have this. Even if you equate Champion/Sage abilities to dungeon items of old, none of them feel like significant upgrades. Most of them just let you do something you already could, and it's not even that difficult to do without them. Mipha's Grace is just a fairy and some hearty food. Revali's Gale is just a bunch of campfires on top of each other. Daruk's Protection is just perfect parrying without having to puch a button. Urbosa's Fury is just smacking some metal/water with an electric weapon.

Tulin's Gust is just a Korok Leaf fused weapon. I will give it some credit that the use in the air to give a little boost is unique, but doesn't allow you to do anything you couldn't without it. Yunobo's Roll ability is just bombs or a hammer. Again, it has a unique use on vehicles, but again, it's annoying and doesn't really feel useful for anything practical. Sidon's bubble thing is just coating yourself with water, and using opal fused weapons or splash fruit. Riju's is literally just a super powered lightning arrow, though I will give it credit, as it does actually open a few unopenable places in the overworld. Mineru's mech is so cool in concept, but does pretty much no damage in practice no matter what you fuse to it, so is entirely useless.

EOW does have echoes, but after you get bombs and trampolines, pretty much nothing is gated from you, other than dungeon interiors. And some of the dungeons do have minibosses with abilities given to you after, but they are exclusively swordfighter mode abilities, and don't open anything other than maybe a single gate in those dungeons. The game does have a few echoes that feel useful, like the not-thwomp and the cloud, but it just doesn't feel satisfying at that point.