And yet, all of that pushes the boundary of how intricately the world is modeled compared to previous Zeldas a hell of a lot further. Btw., there is a school in a certain settlement, even though, of course, characters only sit there during day and leave during nights. And it only has 1/5 to 1/10 of the size you'd expect a class to have in a realistically sized world. There's also at least one instance of a family sitting round a fire eating as well as several instances of characters and locations plainly modeled to show how the world's inhabitants grow crops, herd cattle etc..
There also was a school in Wind Waker and a toilet in Majora's Mask and so on. But it is not an accurate representation of real world desires, needs and life styles. It's a facade, though more emphasis was put on giving a first impression of closeness to reality.
For the purpose of actually modeling a world?
This depens on what a world is. A world in my sense need not be an accurate representation of the real world. It may have boundaries, though they should be stated in a consistent way that is inherent to the game logic, which they were in all examples I cited.
No more than the idea of old low res CRTs having been made obsolete by modern high res displays. You don't need to paint a static background anymore, you can actually model it. You don't need to force a player into a path they can't leave due to invisible walls anymore, you can just let them leave the path. You don't need to limit yourself to paint a grass texture on the ground, but you can model grass. At least something that looks closer to actual grass, within the confines of your LOD. You don't need to build a static house mesh players can't enter, you can instead model the house's whole interior. Of course all within the confines of what the engine and hardware can do, but in terms of how accurately you can model a world, that's objectively more advanced and there's no second way about it.
Here, you are purely arguing on the grounds of technological progress, but technological progress does not necessitate open world design as it is currently done. You can have individually modelled grass and house's interiors in all kinds of world designs, though much of this is purely window dressing. By the way, CRTs are not fully obsolete because of HDTVs, you usually trade better response times for greater resolutions. In fact, I still use a CRT for all TV-based systems.
Which is not to say a game that pushes to those modern boundaries is in any way better than a game that still limits itself to sides scrolling through 2D extracts of an implied world. Such a limited game has no business to claim it's accurately modeling its world anymore however, just as an old low res CRT has no business claiming to give you the best image anymore. Just like actually modeling an openly traversal miniature Hyrule instead reducing it to a matrix of top down screens or reducing it to separately loaded walled of rooms is, well, a more accurate and advanced model of Hyrule.
It may be a more accurate representation of what you imagine Hyrule to be, but a world, conceptually, need not be exactly like ours. Of course, screen swaps instead of scrolling are usually a technological boundary that was put in place by the hardware, I don't argue that smooth scrolling is, if gameplay does not gain from the lack of it, preferrable over static screens. But a conceptual world need not be 3D, it need not have long stretches of nothingness or redundant content like those abysmal enemy camps. A conceptual world can be top down, it can be sidescrolling, it can be fully 3D, it can sport various degrees of freedom. For believable world building, it is important that everything is consistent and follows an inherent logic. This logic need not be the same as reality's.
Whether you find it more fun is a completely different question, but I find it makes all previous Zelda games in terms of the feeling of exploration and discovery they create rather obsolete, as my personal expectation of exploring a game world is not to run into invisible walls left and right of the forest path or to cuddle the left corner of a top down screen to transition to the next. As badly as a Hinox gets stuck in BotW, enemies forgetting I was there and arrows forgetting they flew at me, just because I left their screen is the bigger lie.
I don't see how either is a lie, it's just not a representation of reality. It is fine if your expectations are closer to what BotW does than what other games do, but to state that previously used design concepts are obsolete in consequence is not OK from my point of view.
Edit: If you can't get cozy with the lowres CRT vs. highres modern display analogy, painting styles from absolutely abstract to photorealisitc are probably a better analogy. You may like or prefer any style. But no impressionistic painting of a scene can ever claim to model the scene more accurately than a photorealistic one or an outright foto however, simply because it abstracts details away in favor of focussing on certain aspects of the scene or outright exaggerating them. The difference in your perception of what's the "better" is then what you perceive as more desirable.
Well, as I said, if the goal is absolute realism, then yes, BotW is closer to that than other Zeldas before, though still far away from achieving it in any remarkable way. All the systems were very transparent to me and BotW is in many ways even stiffer and more predictable than previous games in the series. But realism is not the only way to go in art, otherwise we would be stuck with novels like Fontane's annoyingly detailled descriptions of any irrelevant detail in his otherwise intellectually mundane stories as they were common during the phases of realism and naturalism. There are different ways of doing art and in fact, photography has taken a huge toll on photorealism as an artistic direction, which I, personally, think, is a very boring goal anyway. Again, looking at other art forms, Disney can create believable coherent worlds with magic and princesses, Star Trek is believable and coherent as well, though it plays in the future and uses vessels that travel above light speed and so on. Dramas, aiming for a close-as-possible representation of reality in their worlds, are far from the only genre succeeding at world building.
The thing is, realism comes at a cost usually, in different art forms. In books and movies, it limits the intricacy of the stories that are told, something like Star Trek Deep Space Nine's "In the pale moonlight" or basically all of the second season of Hannibal would be impossible in a very accurate depiction of reality. Due to a different appraoch to building their worlds, they manage to craft special experiences that are beyond the scope of a fully realistic world building. If you contrast this with the often less brainy and more personal / emotional stories that are used in many dramas, you can of course prefer the latter, but the former would have to be limited severely if the world design had to conform to restrictions (and freedoms, as well) of reality.
Similarly, I'd argue, that current open world design is not making other designs obsolete, because it limits what you can do as well. You can observe this in Zelda, where BotW has a anticlimatic difficulty curve and puzzles took a serious hit, whereas mechanically less challenging, but repetitive tasks took a bigger part. You can observe this in arcade racers, which suffer significantly from an open world concept, where courses are layed out less clearly, speed takes a backseat and there is a lot of redundant driving in between, which is not actually challenging. Just compare F-Zero GX or Burnout 2 to Forza Horizon or modern Need for Speed to see what I mean. You can see this in Assassin's Creed when compared to its obvious predecessor Prince of Persia, where challenging and intricate climbing sections have been removed by mere traversal, fully trivialised recently by a hookshot. On the flipside you can see that a lot can be gained by making the game more controlled, when you take a look at 3D Mario, offering a much larger frequency of fresh content, without losing (prior to 3D Land, but then, this was a deliberate choice, as well) any of its believability as a world.