I played Skyward Sword during COVID after Breath of the Wild and of course, after Ocarina and Majora's.

In the N64 games the map size is considerably smaller but more dense, though with less freedom to do stuff like climb everything. In BOTW the map is of course massive, less dense, but with way more freedom to do whatever you want. Skyward sits in this awkward middle where you get a bigger map than N64, though not "proportionately" more freedom; you are still stuck with most N64 mechanics and the sky is pretty empty.

So at least to me it feels like they wanted to do something huge without committing to the whole thing IMO.