Regardless of fancy navigation mechanics I don't think I've ever played a 3D environment game where after some time I didn't memorize the map to some degree. I assume this is the case for most people that play games.

I'm more concerned for people that drive around using a GPS in an actual car and somehow never learn the city layout.

. . . I may or may not in fact have considerably more of the WoW geography memorized than the layout of the city I live in.

Same. Sad thing is, as many of these virtual spaces that I have memorized, I've never utilized them for directed memorization efforts for other information using the "Method of the Loci" or "Mind Palace" techniques.

Trying to do this on my Zelda: Breath of the Wild master mode replay. Turned on the "Pro" HUD, which deactivates the map and requires more geography and landmark based navigation... surprisingly fun.

My experience with this kind of thing (like turning off quest markers in oblivion/skyrim) is that the game has been designed with quest markers in mind, and by turning them off the navigation systems stop making much sense. ie the map lacks "natural" markers, and because quest markers exist large view distance isnt very nexessary (and thus non-optimized) so the only larger objects to use can't be seen from a far distance, and the map is just generally designed without interconnectivity or even proper consistency, because the connections are through the markers.

Games depending on such GPS systems tend to be significantly hampered by its removal (which makes sense), and thus such basic removal is rarely a sufficient fix.

The only reason I'd imagine BotW might work fine is that Nintendo has made open(ish) world games before, and as far as I can remember, have never made much use of such systems. More likely than not, the game was designed without markers, and markers added after the fact; which is clearly untrue of most other modern open-world games

That reminds me of the game Firewatch where they gave you a compass and a paper-like map and you had to use landmarks that you recognized on the map and in the environment to get around.

I'd like to see more large scale adventure games like this.

Sadly it's much harder to play without mapping "features" in modern games. In Morrowind quests included detailed (or sometimes intentionally not) directions in the journal text because that was the only way for you to find the objective. In Skyrim the journal entries are far less detailed because the game designers expect you to just follow the magic floating icon.