It felt like they resisted doing this for forever and declined talking about it with interviewers for years and years. But somewhere around Skyward Sword, they pivoted. The hype about Skyward Sword leaned so hard into “This is the earliest game in the Zelda timeline!” They published a book with an official timeline. I don’t know if Aonuma and company just felt bullied by the fans into giving them this thing they seemed to want, or if the Zelda leadership eventually came to be composed of a majority of lore-brained otaku.
I’ve been glad that for the most part, the timeline doesn’t impact the games too much. There are little allusions in Breath of the Wild to all the previous games, but they aren’t beholden to any particular shape of history.
Though it looks like the next one has some time travel, which may bring more lore shit to the fore. And it’ll be the first one, I think, to literally reuse a map (not counting Link Between Worlds, which does do this, right?), making it unusually beholden to a preexisting geography of Hyrule.
EDIT: All this said, it’d be kind of hilarious if they followed up the most broadly appealing Zelda game in a very long time, one that requires no knowledge of previous games, with a super-high-context supersequel to every game in the series with extensive references, completely alienating anyone who doesn’t know the story specifics of everything from Skyward Sword to Adventure of Link. Not good but it’d be pretty funny.