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To some extent, if you're not that obsessive you just don't do that level of completionist run: the games have increasingly made the more annoying collectibles useless or mocking.
That said, there's a lot of the earlier 3d games that were really bad about it. Not fucking about with Korrok Seeds in recent 3d zeldas is the healthy option, where Majora's Mask and the Couple's Mask was legendarily difficult to figure out and time-consuming once you have, and it was something closer to 'major side quest' than 'random golden crap'.
I've always wanted to play Majora's Mask just to experience the groundhog day mechanic. Being able to have active NPCs without breaking a save if you messed up their questline seems really cool. But nobody copying it in the last 20 years means it probably didn't pan out as well as I'd hoped.
And I always give the japs a little extra leeway when it comes bizarre puzzles, just because half the time a Japanese player would be going "aha, this is clearly a cultural reference to kaguyahime the moon logic princess, that means I should go cut some bamboo and give a rabbit his mallet back."
That's fair, and definitely happens -- I think there's been a few Persona games that ask for Majong questions that are trivial for anyone familiar with the game, but nonsense to most Americans, myself included. For the Couple's Mask, there's a bit of that, but mostly the logic is fairly reasonable: it's just the timing being incredibly tight. There's a good number of critical points where you have to be in the right place in a 10-minute window, and if you screw up even one bit, you're back to stage one.
And if you aren't trying for a completionist run, it's a lot less bad. I think my first casual play got a little over half the masks without any real problems or GameFAQsing.
You see variants of the gimmick a bit in visual novels and related games, though usually with a different framing. Being able to continue on and learn from a failure before a reset is a really clever gimmick where it works, and I'll point to Ghost Trick as another game that's a great exploration of that concept. The flaw is less there, and more that the introduction of a strict timeline struggles where the time pressure is too high or too low. Where that pressure's right, you have a lot of strong incentive to keep playing and keep your tempo and focus together. But even with a casual run in Majora's Mask, there'll be a good couple times where you have to sit around for a few minutes just waiting for an event to pop, and there's other times where you'll be sprinting from one event to another because you underestimated how long a fight would take. And that's a problem common to games that did pull a bit from Majora's Mask's social graph side, like the increasing focus on timed behavior in Harvest Moons and other lifesim games.
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