The game looks good. It is highly improved. There's nothing wrong with the game, and it really doesn't deserve an absurd amount of hatred.
THis is the TLDR. This is the fact. I agree with it. I actually think TPHD looks better than WWHD. TPHD didn't add in way too much over bloom and over saturation of colours liek WWHD did. WWHD looks disgusting in my opinion. WWGC (even with it's lower quality 3D models and sprites looks better cause WWHD was butchered in terms of aesthetic and graphics).
TPHD is just a better TP. It's not a revolutionary vusial experience. It was never going to be and Nintendo never hinted that it would be that.
Maybe I'm just being a pessimist, but I always considered a metacritic score of 8.5 to be pretty low and a bit of a red flag.
Critic or public score? I personally don't give a damn about the critic scores as there is much bias and paid review critic scores. Some of the critic review content is decent though.
The public on Metacritic of the other hand often get it right. (recent proof being Fallout 4).