Not so much "have them work", but have more down time between exciting encounters/rewards. That down time should still be fun though and not frustrating or boring (it's the core of your gameplay loop afterall). So the "filler" rooms between rewards still need to be fun and interesting - you can't just have empty corridors or brutal difficulty (unless you have a good reason to). There's unfortunately no real "there should be n rooms between items" answer I can give you because there are too many factors to consider.
As for specific techniques: research and or experiment. There've been several studies around player retention trying to find the sweet spot so you could check out those and design your game around those results (Extra Credits probably has some vids on flow too), or you can observe people playtesting your quest and track their engagement over time - figure out which areas feel too easy or demanding. You can also monitor your own engagement: play other quests/Zelda-likes and keep track of the intervals (in time and space (i.e. screens)) between peak moments of interest. If you find yourself getting bored or frustrated, record why (too long without a reward? Not long enough? Or maybe it's another problem with the design).
To go back to your original problem with making rewards interesting, outside of observing players directly you just need to think like a player. "What would the player need, want, or enjoy at this moment?" Twilight Princess did a pretty bad job here, with too many chests full of rupees when you'd often have a full wallet because there was little incentive to spend at the rate you were hoarding. So rather than a chest of rupees being rewarding it was just more trash you don't want/need - worse still you had to put the rupees BACK if you didn't have room in your wallet, leaving chest markers all over your map with no indication that you've opened them already. Rewards don't necessarily need to be items either - you could reward the player with fun (a mini game or funny moment/easter egg), or lore, or helpful information, or a shortcut - just to name a few examples.
And since you asked for alternate approaches to level design, check out the Boss Keys series by Mark Brown on Youtube. He does a pretty good surface-level analysis of the different kinds of Zelda dungeons that've popped up over the years (which he categorises into "follow the path", "find the path" and "puzzle-box" dungeons - maybe more, been a while since I watched them). At the very least that'll give you some ideas for the kind of dungeon you want to be making (but I don't think he comments much on flow so won't be that helpful figuring out your "radii of filler").
EDIT: Removed duplicate info.
Edited by NoeL, 18 November 2019 - 06:44 PM.