The level design helped a lot with the camera. Subsequent games (doing 3d) tried to make more realistically sized spaces where there wasn’t a 6ft area clear behind the character at all times and tied themselves in knots trying to make it work (rather than re-designing levels).

Mario64’s camera was a wonderful piece of design.

Yeah and the Lakitu framing did a lot of hidden work. The camera isnt an abstract system to them, its a guy on a cloud. So when you hit the C buttons youre not rotating a camera rig, youre asking Lakitu to move. That one fiction makes the controls legible without a tutorial. Id love to see more games steal that trick instead of dumping camera docs in a settings menu.