I played BotW a lot, and really loved it. I feel like the beginning of the game was relatively easy compared to TotK, I died a few times trying out things, discovering the game and possibilities ; in TotK I died a lot and still do even with good gear and armour (1*-2* armors, 30-40+ damage weapons).
You could say it's skill issues and I would agree with you as I am not a pro player and play games once a week maybe, however I feel like the difficulty curve is far greater in TotK.
That has affected how I view the game to the point that sometimes I think I dislike it (even though the new powers are the best thing they could have added, with the verticality of the world) ; that might also have to do with the much darker ambiance of the game, which can feel frightening (to me) to the point going underground is hard.
Overall it's not "difficult", I would say, but there are individual things I find difficult here or there. A couple bosses (looking at you, Water and Lightning Temple bosses) took me more than one try to beat, and there have been a few shrine puzzles I had to look up solutions for, but those are exceptions to the general difficulty. The most difficult thing to me for general difficulty is trying to figure out how to reach a lot of places in the sky. I'm on the " final push" to get all the shrines before I take on the final boss, and I'm definitely gonna get them all on the surface, but I may choose not to do all the sky shrines because I just don't know how I'm going to get up/over to them. In many cases, islands are just spaced out too far apart or too high for devices to last long enough to reach, and you can't really glide to them because you're always on a soft descent when gliding. Basically, sky navigation has me kinda stumped, and I may find getting all the sky shrines to then just not be worth it.