Weirdly enough, I started playing it just yesterday. I'm a gamer and I died about 10 times in the first 2 hours. I always read it's newbie friendly etc, but am wondering how, as the game doesn't seem to have handhelding at all :D
The realisation was that "wait, Link is a coward!". I then avoided most battle encounters and spent most of my time just exploring.
What I think is really good is that there is no one right way to do something. With some games if you can't figure out what they are trying to tell you, you hit a brick wall. With BotW, I could always figure something out, even if it wasn't "right". For example, at one point you can talk to the old man chopping down trees and the intent is for you to chop down a tree to make a bridge across a gap. For whatever reason, I didn't pick up on this. However, there was a wall that I thought I might be able to use to climb over there. It wasn't trivial (I died several times), but it taught me how to find little places on walls to recover stamina while climbing. I was still able to get over there. This lesson on climbing paid dividends throughout my entire play through, while the tree bridge mechanic was almost never needed again.
The first non-red Bokoblin (in the skull with the archer out front) probably killed me 10 times on the first play through. That was a bit frustrating, but I eventually got it. But I just ran in there and tried to fight him directly. To use tactics, you should have just gotten a bow and arrow before activating the first tower, and you can shoot the rope that suspends the hanging light inside the skull (by shooing through the hole where the skull's eye would be). This causes an explosion and gives you a big leg up in the fight. Later there are shines that help teach you how to use the various fighting mechanics, which help level up your skill controlling Link.
Most of the dying I didn't mind so much, because there was little to no penalty for it, and all felt like I was learning something. Can I jump off this high thing... nope dead... how else can I do this? I used the manual save a lot, instead of just relying on the autosave, if I was about to do something risky.
With that being said I don’t think it is newbie friendly though. The controls uses all buttons and many with different modes. It’s can be quite overwhelming imho.