Honestly I agree. I explored for about 2.5 hours before I got the thing. I happened upon several shrines you can’t complete without it, and getting places took far longer - and was more tedious - than if I’d had it. I also couldn’t figure out what to do with certain landmarks. So I looked that up, and discovered that I did indeed need to go do the first quest to unlock this stuff. I really wish the game gave the player a hint of what they’d get for the first quest, since that stuff is almost mandatory.
Without spoiling anything, most puzzles are built primarily to take advantage of the new abilities. Some focus more on certain abilities, some on a combination. Some of them combine the abilities with physics puzzles - those ones I usually find frustrating/fiddly. I find most of the shrine puzzles to be well-made, much better than the BotW ones, and I’ve loved most of the 24 or so shrines I’ve done. I enjoy the “aha!” moments, especially when I have a “wait, does this do that? Ohmygod it does!” breakthrough. There are a few that I had to look up though because I just don’t find the “play with this thing for 15 minutes and stumble upon the solution” gameplay loop to be particularly fun, and I’m nowhere near as inventive or curious as the designers want me to be - some solutions are extremely obscure. But this is something I struggle with in other Zelda games too. I’m just bad at puzzles.