I agree, the early game is definitely harder in ToTK than in BotW. The vibe feels a bit similar to Noita, IMO, in that the odds are stacked against you, and you offset the disadvantage by making liberal use of as many overpowered combos as you can think of.

Anyways, my advice is really just that. Find good combos, and spam the hell out of them. One easy thing to do is to burn chuchu jellies to create red chuchu jellies. Then, fuse them onto arrows to create incendiary arrows. Great for dealing with crowds, and the explosion radius isn't as big as a bomb flower, so there's less chance of you accidentally killing yourself. Red chuchu jellies's function similarly to fire fruits, but I just find that it's easier to get a ton of red chuchu jellies.

If you're in snowy areas, you can also shoot down some icicles and fuse them onto spears. That freezes any enemy that it hits, which is good if you get surrounded easily. You can also collect ice fruit/white chuchu jellies to make freezing arrows.

In general, you get way more arrows in ToTK than in BotW, so your playstyle will naturally need to lean a bit more into long range combat to make effective use of your resources

Here's a couple other interesting interactions you can take advantage of:

• find (or ultrahand) a heavy object. Drop it onto the enemy.

• wind staggers enemies. If you find an enemy charging up an attack, take out a guster and blow wind at the enemy