A few years ago I watched a French vampire movie in the “so bad it’s good” category: Requiem pour un Vampire (Requiem for a Vampire). In it there’s a scene where a character walks slowly through a very large room to light a torch and back, in one single take. This is a 2 minutes long take showing just one character walking. It’s such a pointless long take it can’t but leave you puzzled as to why it’s in the movie — good movies are edited to get rid of those boring moments.
A lot of games are much worse than that when it comes to walking dead time. In most RPG, you’ve got to walk long distances to do anything, even if there’s nothing interesting to do while you’re walking. You spend a lot of time walking from shop to shop in Diablo, even though there’s absolutely nothing interesting happening between those shops, for example. It’s just dead time.
Zelda tries to make the time moving from dungeon to dungeon more fun by adding filler: random monsters to fight, ghosts to capture, fences to jump over and so on. It’s filler, but at least it’s somewhat fun.
Other solutions exist. Most games keep your character running at all time, which reduces time spent moving around, but it also makes the game feel somewhat silly (I find it hard to take seriously characters who are constantly jogging, even when there’s no rush). A better solution is to let characters warp at any time to known locations — the game just skips the walking part. Mass Effect does it by having taxis you can take in some locations.
In any case, the best solution is to just skip dead time. Just avoid boring bits that don’t make the game progress in a meaningful way.