… he sleeps all night and he works all day … ♪

(Thanks, now I have that dumb lumberjack song stuck in my head, lol)

More and more relevant by every passing day …

To be fair, in both cases the situation would have been the same: An after-school club with a fictional mascot taken from Christian mythology, protested BY Christians who are ironically the only ones to actually believe that said mascot exists IRL.

They disappeared after the Calamity was defeated,

… except, conveniently, for the Guardian parts used in the Skyview Towers (the “arms” that grab Link, the control units, etc.), or the dead Guardian atop the Hateno Tech Lab, or the Guardian “daggers” that were formerly turned into Ancient Arrows (which Link can DIY now), or the Purah Pad which is basically a rebranded Sheikah Slate, or the telescope atop Purah’s little lab at Lookout Landing …

Oh and of course the after-credits scene in BotW, where Zelda states that she wants to go investigate Vah Ruta to find out why the Divine Beast stopped working and check whether it can be repaired. The “Calamity” was dead by then as the scene takes place days or even weeks after the final battle, but I guess noone had told the Divine Beasts yet that they were meant to inexplicably go poof along with the main antagonist.

IMHO it would have made a lot more sense to say that the people of Hyrule actively dismantled and destroyed most Sheikah Tech they could find so it would be impossible for Ganon to possess them again. That would explain why there is still some of it left in remote corners of the Kingdom, and it is a more down-to-earth explanation than “it just vanished”.

All in all, it really DOES sound like a lazy “I don’t care” explanation.

Like others have said already: it sells. It’s the same reason why seemingly every single fantasy/adventure game is called an “RPG” regardless of whether or not it contains actual RPG elements, like creating your own character.

… and some of them technically don’t even exist. “Breath of the Wild 2” for example was a placeholder title for Tears of the Kingdom until the title was revealed in September 2022. Why would anyone use a placeholder name that has not been used by anyone in over a year?

I hope this doesn’t come across as rude, but as someone who has an aunt that behaves VERY similar, I can only say that some people do not want solutions - they want to be mad about something and others to agree with them. Finding easy ways to remove the problem instead of being allowed to complain about it is the opposite of what they expect to achieve.