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I was thinking specifically of Breath of the Wild.
For me, Zelda has always been about scratching my completionist itch.
Making all the weapons temporary means I never get to feel the power of a completed inventory. Instead I'm just trading off weapons that I don't like for more weapons that I don't like. And if I do like one, it breaks anyway.
I didn't even bother with Tears of the Kingdom for that reason. It's a feel-bad mechanic, and I'd rather not do it.
I can understand why it was polarizing. The game for sure broke a lot of norms in the franchise, and I too wasn't happy about that at first, because it didn't meet my initial expectations. But I think the weapon system is designed to encourage the player to explore the game mechanics, which if you just stick with one type of weapon you miss so much of, so I think it's important to the game that they had it the way they did.
But yeah, I remember hating it at first so I definitely get it. My perspective changed but I totally understand if it never worked for you.
Breath of the Wild does it both wrong and right.
Weapons in BotW are almost like ammunition. A given sword or club or whatever does so much damage per swing, and will last a certain number of swings, so it represents an amount of damage you can do to an enemy. This system is at its best when you break a sword over an enemy's head, pick up his weapon, and then keep beating him with that. Problem is, there's only so cool weapons can get. Players that want to work hard to get a really cool weapon don't really have a way to both play with it and keep it around. Hell, the Master Sword breaks and grows back.
BotW does it right with shields. Shields have a use case, and an abuse case. If you do a perfect parry, your shield takes no damage. Same thing happened in Skyward Sword, if you abused your shield too much, it broke. But if you used it correctly, it wouldn't break. If you built use cases and abuse cases for weapons, for example, bashing a sword against an enemy's shield would wear it out, but striking soft flesh wouldn't, that would reward players for learning the combat system by giving them a way to keep their coolest swords around.
TotK...Youtuber Skittybitty did a 3-hour takedown of that game and I could add at least two hours of my own criticism.
Honestly I'd probably give it another shot if they just made the Master Sword unbreakable. Why wouldn't it be? It's Link's main weapon in other games.
But they're all in on this temporary weapon gameplay loop. And I get that; I understand that sometimes it can be a good thing to push the player into playing the game a certain way. Except they already did that for most of the game. If the Master Sword were unbreakable, you'd still have plenty of players doing the constant weapon swapping, but you'd also have a few more players like me actually playing the game. I'd probably even swap weapons most of the time, secure in the knowledge that I still had a weapon that wouldn't break when I need it.
Plus how good is your gameplay loop if you have to force it on the player?
But I know I'm in the minority on this. It's weird to see people loving a Zelda game more than I do, because for 30 years of my life that would never have been the case. Hopefully they return to the old formula for the next game.
I always figured that the Master Sword should have been unbreakable, just a mediocre weapon against normal enemies but very powerful against Malice'd enemies. Like it should have been a 10 sword when not glowing, and 100 when glowing. Because the Master Sword is Sting now.