So OK let's talk about BotW/TotK's relationship to failure.
Breath of the Wild deliberately shares a lot of DNA with Ocarina of Time. The timeskip into a devastated Hyrule, obviously; with the pathos coming from "I knew this place as it was" and "I must have known this place as it was but I can't remember," both of which carry their own crushing heaviness. But the other thing they're going for in BotW is a more in-depth exploration of the question OoT was asking, which is:
What does failure mean when you're a child burdened with responsibilities that are too big for you? How does the calculus change when you're a child with divinely-granted power beyond anyone's imagining?
In OoT, Zelda openly and explicitly acknowledges her decisions as a failure. She's very clear about the fact that her sending Link on a quest for the Spiritual Stones is exactly what granted Ganondorf access to the Sacred Realm. Is this fair? No. She was eleven and no one would listen to her and she didn't know what to do in the face of a terrifying prophecy. Is this fair? Yes. She's the princess of a divine imperialist monarchy gifted with powerful magic, she shouldn't be able to order the execution of a foreign dignitary based on a dream, and her decisions cascade down to every one of Hyrule's citizens.
BotW hammers the point of failure even harder. Zelda sees herself as a failure, her father sees her as a failure, even the Champions acknowledge that her relationship with Link is difficult because he's 'succeeded' in unlocking divine power where she has not. BotW is, however, conversely softer on Zelda than OoT by more explicitly framing the expectations placed on her as cruel and unfair. (They are cruel and unfair expectations! And at the same time, Hyrule's survival resting on the shoulders of a teenage girl is even more cruel and unfair to the countless Hylians who died in the Calamity. Like OoT, BotW doesn't try to solve or reconcile this for us.)
Tears of the Kingdom, on the other hand, gracelessly sidesteps the idea of failure entirely. There is no evidence of past failure that belongs to TotK's own storyline; you're playing in a post-Calamity Hyrule that is actively rebuilding and thriving. Link and Zelda are now both in their twenties and seasoned combatants who understand their powers. Rauru's failure to permanently seal Ganondorf doesn't seem to have irreversible effects on either past or present-day Hyrule. Zelda herself once again fails to seal Ganondorf despite that being the entire point of BotW's storyline. Then Zelda and Rauru both immediately take the route of drastic sacrifice as, I guess, a pre-emptive penance to prevent the narrative from really engaging with those failures.
(This is not the same as BotW Zelda choosing to hold the Calamity in combat for a century, which is presented in-game as a temporary condition she will be delivered from; rather than TotK's draconification which is presented as permanent and irrecoverable. The former reads as duty, the latter reads closer to punishment.)
The only thing you could really count as a true mistake on TotK's terms is Rauru and Zelda's strategic/political missteps in handling Ganondorf, both of which cause Sonia's death. But, again, the narrative refuses to engage with these; Rauru was simply too noble and trusting, and Zelda couldn't possibly have foreseen a betrayal (with her prophetic powers and presumably extensive political education.)
And in the end, this makes TotK even less fair to both Link and Zelda than BotW or OoT was. Instead of being allowed to struggle and fail and eventually carve out a bloody victory on their own terms, they're both deadlocked into unavoidable single-path decisions that don't allow for failure or success. Just the absolute horror of Zelda's millennia of lobotomized draconification, Link's loss of his anchor to his own life, history & memories - and whatever the future looks like for them after being confronted with the fact that the most significant losses of their young lives produced a victory that seems to have lasted for less than five years, before the cycle returned to eat them alive again.
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