as a kid i literally never considered doing the Shadow temple before the Spirit temple - I always did Shadow last. it wasn't until i was an adult on the internet that i found out that a lot of people are convinced that Forest -> Fire -> Water -> Shadow -> Spirit is the Canon, Intended, True order and anything else is simply Incorrect. which is totally bizarre to me lol.
i've done a lot of different temple orders in different playthroughs (i'm a big Fire Temple First person these days tbh), but i see people saying things like, "you're supposed to use the hover boots in the spirit temple/to reach the desert colossus" and i find that deeply confusing because i have basically never used them outside of Shadow temple/Ganon's castle except for a laugh just to see what they can do.
or like "the game pushes you to the Shadow temple after the Water temple," and i guess like... if you don't do anything except what navi tells you to i guess that's true? but you can get the lens of truth like right away by following up on the song of storms sidequest once shiek moves out of the way of the sword pedestal, you don't have to wait for bongo bongo to break out. and if you ignore navi (and i almost always do), it's really easy to go straight from Lake Hylia after the Water Temple to the Gerudo desert right next door without even considering going back to Kakariko first. why would i do that? i already did all the minigames and trading sequence stuff after the Forest or Fire temple at the latest!
i do kind of see how the Spirit temple is "supposed" to be a big penultimate dungeon on Ganondorf's home turf. like this is the argument that i buy somewhat more than the others... but at the same time, the Shadow temple also serves as a dangerous, horror-themed gauntlet of a temple, and at the end Impa is there to foreshadow the Shiek reveal cutscene right before the final dungeon, so it also kinda works. it's like the other four temples are a tour of the different cultures of Hyrule and how Ganondorf ruined their lives, and then it ends with a temple in the graveyard of the Hylians and the Shiekah in the village where all the refugees from the Castle Town went. that's how i always looked at it anyway.
thanks for reading this weird screed about my normal temple order i guess lol. my main point is that even if the game does have an ""intended"" order, it's a bit more open ended than some people seem to think to the point where this seems to be a pretty common source of disagreement among ocarina players. if you read this far, feel free to leave a comment about your ocarina temple order.