It's littered with sidequests... it's just not listed as such but those shrines are sidequests...
An open world game shouldn't make it hard to traverse vast distances, shouldn't need you to catch your own horse. Climbing a tower shouldn't be so time intensive. Everything about BotW is designed to waste your time. That's everything an open world game shouldn't do. You get a car or horse within 5 minutes of the opening cinematics in GTA/RDR and then you can go do whatever you want in those games and never even have to interact with the story.
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