Makes me think of Elite Dangerous towards the end. I loved it and it was one of the greatest games to exist in... and then I started looking up things online and the magic was gone. Once you view a game as a collection of systems, it's impossible to keep that sense of exploration and discovery.
Holy shame. I've been trying to work out exactly why I like some open world games and not others, and why BOTW is my favourite and this video has told me the answer!
Its because Zelda barely gives you any objectives, and pretty much everything you do is your own choice. Most of the map, you're going wherever you want to go, and not really towards some icon on the map symbolising something, or a quest location or anything like that.
Meanwhile something like The Witcher 3 complete overwhelmed me with loads of different objectives, so I felt like I was playing a checklist that kept getting bigger as I ticked things off, rather than playing a game. Like everywhere you go there's loads of question marks, dozens of quests to pick up and do, it was just too much stuff.
The Witcher 3 is the biggest offender I can think of, and other games fit on the scale in between that and BOTW.
And I know GOW isn't really open world, but this is one thing it does really well too. Objectives have their own areas, so you know where you're going and you know what you're doing when you go there. There isn't lots of different objectives fighting over the same space.