Yeah, designing games geared towards kids and younger audiences isn’t just about story/aesthetics, it’s also about difficulty. Most young kids don’t have the attention span or critical thinking skills to sit there and try to beat an enemy or puzzle that older kids or adults would find genuinely challenging.
I could split Nintendo games (I’ve played) into three groups based on target audience:
Younger: cute art style, simple challenges, short game play for young children; Kirby, Yoshi
All Ages: easy-to-learn basics to get you through the main game, but there’s more complex stuff and greater challenge if you want it; mostly pick-up-and-play but not TOO short; Mario, Pokemon, DK Country, Super Smash Bros.
Older Gamers: more (relatively) mature subject matter, challenge from the beginning, complex mechanics and/or puzzles or both to get teen/adult brains going; Metroid, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda BotW and TotK (previous Zelda games would be in my All Ages tier)
Tears of the Kingdom. I did figure out where the tear in the Hebra geoglyph was and have gotten a bunch more since then. I went madlad and completed Gerudo second of the four areas despite Gerudo usually being the hardest area in these types of Zelda games, and honestly, the only really hard part of it was the temple boss, which took me a fair number of tries and a short detour from the temple for some cooking, but I eventually beat it when I discovered a trick for the second half of the fight. Now I’m just wandering the land filling the map some more and doing a bunch of side quests and shrines where I find them before I take on the Goron area third.
EDIT: I should note I’m not wandering without an objective, I wanted to make sure I visited Kakariko and Hateno villages at least. I actually spent almost my entire three-hour play session last night in and around Hateno doing side quests.