As a long-standing Zelda fan, and after months of mulling it over, I can safely say that of the core-Zelda games TotK is pretty close to the bottom for me.
Good question! And mind you I'm only comparing these games to each other and nothing else.
That said, the tier list or me would look like this:
BotW and ALttP are S Tier Zelda games, they are built solidly, easy to understand at a baseline for most players, have a high level of "check this shit out" glitches and tricks for dedicated players, and have a very distinct style that permeates the Zelda franchise as a whole. Iconic standards for the series and extremely fun and easy to play.
WW, TP, Ages, Seasons, LA, and ALBW are A Tier Zelda games. They have their own unique identity while still playing into a lot of what makes the S Tier games so great for me. The clever designs, different worlds, and focus on "different, but familiar" makes these a cut above the rest.
MC, ALttP GBA, OoT, and MM are B Tier for me.
I love what OoT and MM did to bring the series into 3D but I do think that, because of controls and some gameplay mechanics, they didn't age as well as others. Still beloved and amazing, but upon going over it again other Zelda games have withstood the test of time a bit better, and that's BECAUSE they were the first. So credit where credit is due. For MC, it's bold uniqueness makes it worth the playing flat out, it rules, but some of the collectathon-ness from the kinstones makes it a bit clunky. ALttP GBA has great quality of life upgrades BUT I'm docking it points for this version having a lot of washed out colors due to the GBA (the Mario GBA remakes have similar issues).
Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, and The Adventures of Link are C Tier. FULL CREDIT TO ALL OF THESE for really being mold breakers in a lot of ways, but the back and forth repetition from PH and TAoL especially make some gameplay just a bit annoying.
Spirit Tracks having "Ghost Zelda" as a mechanic almost made it B Tier, but with how the gameplay feels a bit clunky and slow due to DS touch screen stuff it sits in C Tier with PH. All really fun, but ultimately not fun enough for me to go back and replay them as much as the others.
Tears of the Kingdom, Skyward Sword, The Legend of Zelda, and Four Swords Adventures are D Tier. Now, D Tier doesn't mean "Garbage Awful Terrible Throw Them Away!!!!" it just means "I have enough issues with these that makes them not fun to play a second time."
Skyward Sword is clever and really tried to push motion controls to the next level, but they really don't work as well as they should and even with the adjustments for the Switch port, it's still not fun enough to worth ANOTHER $60 purchase just for No-Motion-Controls-Edition. Groose rules though. Fi is a really fun narrative addition. And I think the story and game itself gets an unnecessary amount of hate, it's a fun game and worth playing, but it's a "one and done" for me. The Legend of Zelda, the one that started it all... kinda absolutely blows to play these days. Back when it first came out it was revolutionary in a lot of ways but... it's was so obtuse and difficult to play BACK THEN and has only become more so now. Playing it without a guide feels like an impossible task unless you're already BEYOND familiar with the game. Four Swords Adventures is a cute idea... that falls on it's butt because of the GBA To GameCube connector cables being needed for multiplayer. Playing solo is fine, and what I did, but multiplayer is what they had in mind for it when they developed it and it's just... not easy to do legitimately? It was expensive to do at the time and WAY more expensive now. Tears of the Kingdom lands here because I feel Nintendo focused on what Speed Runners and High Level Players were able to accomplish in BotW while also kinda ignoring that most people don't play games like that, it's obtuse in a lot of ways, removes your story progress from the previous game to make BotW's endeavors feel kinda worthless, and because it's set in the same place "but not really, but also yes really, but also shut up and stop asking questions" you end up feeling like you've been here before yet everyone insists it's "ALL NEW". Rather than expanding the world, we're given an Up Place and a Down Place. The Down Place is almost entirely not needed to be explored as the reward is worthless. The Up Place is incredibly small in comparison and traversal can be cumbersome. And the regular place is "different... ish" and made me a bit frustrated about redoing all the things I did in BotW all over again (a complaint I have for EVERY game that does that to me). The characters are as fun as ever, but the new mechanics (while neat on paper) ended up feeling so overbaked yet undercooked that I ended up solving most puzzles by just walking over to a thing and just doing it and ignoring the intended way because it would take way too much resource gathering, way too much time, or was just too much effort for the reward of "One Piece of A Five Piece Thing To Level Up One Thing." TotK feels like the Too Many Cooks meme where you have a LOT of great ideas that ultimately end up fighting each other and never feeling as good as BotW did.
Ultimately they are all REALLY fun games and I think the Zelda franchise as a whole has some of the most fun gameplay you can get in a series that's spanned so many titles and so many years. They're all worth playing, have their own charm, and find ways to build upon each other one way or another but yeah, TotK kinda was a big "meh" for me in comparison.
