There are a few reasons, but if I had to put a finger on the biggest issue it would probably be the lack of story. I'm a very story focused gamer (blame FF7 for that) and so when a game story is just kind of passive sniplets or uber generic game after game, I just don't give a shit. And frankly the gameplay in Zelda games is really not good enough to carry it without that narrative throughline to keep pushing me forward.
Occasionally I do try Zelda games, like I did with Breath of the Wild, and the same problems pop up every fucking time. Only with BotW it was worse because I genuinely believe that the gameplay in BotW is bad. It tries to do too many things with the world and the gameplay that interfere with player freedom. The weapon durability is a huge problem for me because it eliminates not only the freedom of weapon choice to the player, but it also drastically hurts the potential enjoyment of any cool weapons you can find because the player knows that no matter how cool a weapon is, it's gonna break within a couple enemies so the joy of using it is shit on.
If their goal was to encourage the player to try new weapons, all they needed to do was have cool weapons with cool effects and maybe an enemy weakness system. Something like oh Lionall's are weak to electric weapons and maces, so maybe the player has electric arrows, or an electric sword. Or maybe they just have a cool mace. It presents them with loadout options that all would work in a different cool way with the enemy, but also doesn't have the player feeling like they are wasting their weapons on enemies that don't matter.
Or fuck, just add a way for Link to repair the weapons with materials found around the world. It's not that fucking hard of a concept.
But more than the weapon problem, Breath of the Wild had an exceptionally boring world problem. While there are cool moments like the Devine Beasts and the final zone, the vast majority of what the player will find in the game is the same repetitive shit over and over again. 150 shrines that are broken into three different types, 900 Korak Seeds, a bunch of Ubisoft towers. BotW and ER share the same problem in having a world that's too big with too much repeating content and very little reward most of the time.
Finally I work 45 hours a week, sometimes more. So when I'm at home playing a game I'm not really interesting in exploring a blank world. Some people hate it, but I actually really enjoy the Ubisoft style open world, where there is a ton of shit on my map that I can pick and chose what I want to do and I don't have to "find the fun". I very much enjoy the guided experience when I play because I'm not spending my free time running around trying to find the fun activity, I can just mark the map and go directly to the fun with less downtime.
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