"...You'd still be you," Link says. "Even if you change."

Link knows this, from personal experience. He's never had a frozen heart - but he did lose all of his memories. He'd had the same thoughts, the same worries.

And as he'd regained fragments of his memories, when he'd been able to talk to Zelda...he'd learned that he had changed. Significantly. He wasn't the same as he'd been, before the Calamity.

But he wasn't a completely different person either. He wasn't unrecognisable.