With both BOTW and totk out of mind, would you say that the Zelda series isn’t heavy on connecting the timeline together anyway? If that makes any sense. I’m just curious.

It makes sense bc that's exactly how I feel! I think the games were NEVER intended to perfectly fit into any sort of a timeline, be it a triple one or a linear one. I think each game reinvents the lore and uses iconography of previous games only to reimagine instead of follow the conventions set by its predecessors. I don't care what Nintendo says, the official timeline makes no sense and I don't mind at all actually. On a creative level, it's fun to reinvent a world over and over again across decades, and on a capitalist level it's easier to sell games featured under one series brand than it is to sell each and every one as its own thing. IRL legends also rarely follow exact history, so if you don't wanna suspend your disbelief you can just tell yourself it's a series of legends that got transformed throughout times and there is no way to know if they are true.

BotW did great to establish this exact philosophy - it namedropped all three timelines, it features architectural and cultural references to everything, effectively rendering the official timeline useless. It doesn't matter which legends are true, the only thing that really matters is that Zelda is Hylia's descendant, Link is the reincarnation of the Hero, and Ganondorf was sealed away at one point and turned into Ganon. BUT THEN TotK said "Nuh-uh" and presented an alternative history that had nothing to do with ANYTHING. AT ALL. LIKE. NOTHING. NOT EVEN BOTW. If BotW was a love letter to all the games that came before it, TotK was a fire setting ablaze all the gentle nostalgia until only the barest bones of "Zelda is a princess of Hyrule" remained.