There’s certainly been tons of moments through gaming history when designers attempted to force a playstyle and it didn’t work out. It’s still hard to say for me where XCOM would lie on that, because there’s at least one other tactics game, Steamworld Heist, that I think worked out much better with a semi-turn-limit; I felt much more accomplished when I managed to escape those levels within a certain turn limit.
There’s mods out there for emulated Breath of the Wild to turn off weapon degradation, and I’m actually curious how the reviews go for mods like that. You lose out on moments where you actually enjoy finding a 90-attack weapon, because you’d find it and go “Meh…I already have a 100-damage weapon.” And because the game isn’t promoting constant power progression, it doesn’t have a ton of different things to reward you with for quests and exploration if you’re never losing things from your inventory - so you’d pretty quickly be ending quests with “Man I don’t even want this”.
I get that it’s important for designers to hear out their players, but there have been many times gamers were wrong about what exactly it was they thought they wanted. Nintendo in general has to be really careful about making sure they don’t betray expectations on certain series. Pikmin in particular had a winning formula in their first game. Even if they make changes/additions, if they damage that initial element, it can hurt the enjoyability of the experience, even if it adds freedom.