You are free to progress anyway you want.

Theoretically you can go wherever you want you could even confront Ganon early on, the world is open for you to choose how you wish to go about it.

Now, just because you can doesn't mean you should - because if you try to fight Ganon early on you'll obviously lose.

What they wanted to do was leave it open to the player to decide how they wish to undergo their journey, this also applies in dungeons.

The typical formula for Zelda games was unlocking an item and needing to use that to complete the next dungeon and so on as well as needing to do them in a certain order, this isn't how they went about BotW they made sure puzzles had multiple solutions and it all depends on the player how they choose to solve it and the order in which they do them.