In very many analog and digital role-playing games, your character progresses by gathering experience points, which give levels, and gaining levels makes you stronger. Then a higher level character can tackle higher level enemies. Depending on the game, the higher level enemies either just appear as you level up, or you have different zones of different levels, and gaining levels gives you access to these higher level zones. The Legend of Zelda games work completely different: If you kill a lot of monsters, especially bigger ones and boss monsters, a secret, hidden xp score goes up. That xp score levels up the monsters all over the world. But *not* your hero. Meanwhile many of the activities that would make your hero stronger, like doing shrines or gathering materials to make better weapons, are not directly linked to monster fights and the xp score.

As I don't enjoy action combat all that much, I am avoiding combat as much as possible. So the first thing I did in this Tears of the Kingdom run was to unlock all the sky towers. That not only reveals all of the surface level map, but also gives a convenient network of fast travel points. Use the sky towers to launch up into the sky, and you can both reach various sky islands, and fly very far on the surface level to reach shrines and other points you want to go. With very little walking comes very little combat. Which means that my hero is now rather strong, due to having gathered a lot of stamina and hearts from shrines, and having gathered good armor and weapons. But my hidden xp score is probably still extremely low, and the monsters haven't evolved much. So when I do get into a fight, it isn't much of a problem.

The only flaw in this strategy is that a bunch of features are locked behind doing at least one of the four regional boss fights. So sooner or later I'll have to go to Rito Village and do a part of the main quest there. Other than that I have effectively decoupled my progress from the monster scaling mechanic.