Kid me hated it but adult me's almost in the opposite camp.
That said I don't know if it's because my way of thinking's changed or because grinding just kinda became more fun. Like, with Pokemon I still think grinding to be really boring. Unless it's emulated, in which case I can do that all day because of fast forward. I completed FFs 1, 3, and 4 on the PSP. On an emulator. Largely thanks to fast forward. Because the most annoying part of grinding is the amount of time it takes to get from 1 encounter to the next.
Then there's games which just facilitate the process themselves. The World Ends With You had a chaining system which not only made grinding fast, but also made it so that when you made big chains you'd get big rewards, that's hella satisfying. Autobattle's been a standard inclusion in games lately and thank god for it, it makes playing just about anything instantly more relaxing.
And then there's the last example which is just games that make grinding fun purely by just being fun games. Action RPGs have this down to a science for the most part since the gameplay loop kind of lives or dies on how fun the combat is. The process doesn't even need to be facilitated, it's just...playing the game. But even outside of games with just fun combat there's like, say, Persona 4 which makes grinding really satisfying by way of the EXP and *then* the Arcana Chance and *then* dropping loooots of junk which you don't need to sort or keep tabs on because you can just sell it all to get better gear. It's practically always rewarding so there's rarely such a thing as a wasted encounter.
All of this is stuff I like. But there are times where I just plain don't want to no matter what. Like Pokemon was the example I mentioned above, unless there's a convenient way to, which usually there isn't, I just avoid it on the platform proper. In FFXIV, grinding there drives me up the *wall* unless I diversify somehow. Doing the same thing over and over in the same place in a game that's built around playing one exact way (usually) is very tiring very quickly for me, so I usually keep dungeon grinding to a minimum. Still have no idea how I managed to get the Zodiac relic. But the rule of thumb's simply that if it's slow, monotonous, and/or unrewarding it's just a huge hamper on the experience overall.
