Well, again, I may just be bias. But I have never thought the world could ever be described as empty. There's 120 shrines to find with 42 of those being hidden until you've completed a quest, along with a butt-tonne of korok seeds, sides quests, enemy camps, areas to find that tell stories (such as the battleground) Lynels, the list goes on.
There's stretches of may withMay with little in it, for sure, but I think it's better that way. Sometimes J just wanted to explore and yet more times I wanted the challenge of traversing the environment. I wasn't interested in distractions. However, they were there when I needed them. I cant say I ever traversed more than 5 minutes without encountering something of interest other than perhaps in the snowy mountains or Gerudo Desert.
I love WW, it was my favorite game until BotW came along. There were critisizers of the Great Sea, for sure, but not nearly as many people complaining of an empty Great Sea as those that complain about BotW being empty. Yet the latter filled the world with little points of interest everywhere, whilst the former was very often completely barren until you reached your destination.
I guess you could pin this down to a difference in playstyles. I played loving the journey, and enjoying the act of exploring and finding things. A lot of other people however played with exploring simply being a means to an end. If you look at the map and say "What's interesting between here and here" you probably couldn't think of much. However when you actually make the trip, there's hundreds of tiny little distractions to be had.