Guided open world

I was really upset when I started playing this game, I really enjoyed BOTW, and figured i would love TOTK, but like others I'm finding I'm being 1 shot (with 5 hearts) by field enemies. It seems like this game, similar to when pokemon did open world, forces you to compete it in a certain order. Like yes BOTW did have an order you needed for it, but it was mostly the boss enemies that were more difficult. This game is actually crazy for doing it as a guided open, I was expecting it to be like BOTW with hidden EX, but it looks like they got rid of that??