I agree 100%. I loved the game, but I don't understand how anyone at Nintendo thought that these mechanics were a good idea. To make matters even worse, the button is the same to pick up an item. I can't count how many times I was about to pick up an item, and a sage passed by, hijacking the button (especially disruptive when it's Mineru).
The fact that you can dismiss the sages through a hastily bolted on menu interaction tells you that they knew it was annoying. If it worked well you'd never need to.
Imo the game kind of feels thrown together in general. I think the worst part is that they traded the open feeling of adventure in the original game, which felt quite lean on mechanics and different things to do, for a much more common open world style of gameplay. Now it feels like any other checkbox open world game, a huge list of things to do and going through them one by one. BotW never felt like that
I phrase it like that because I'm about 160 hours in to ToTK right now and just last night I found something that would have made me fantastically wealthy the whole way through if I had known about it. Now it doesn't matter.
Go to the Jungle Stable, do the thing with the animals. Feed them. Come back later. Repeat constantly.
And they moved them to interactions next to the sages because they sincerely overloaded the controls of that game.
The whole game would have been better without any sages’ power.