> " It does make me feel a bit less inclined to play old RPGs now, knowing that I’m grinding just to increase a few bytse of memory."

Superficially, most games can probably be judged the same way, even physical games like golf etc.

"You mean the main purpose of this game is to get a ball in a hole with as few hits as possible, why would I want to do that"?

or Idle/incremental games: On the surface the whole point is to play the game, just to play the games faster.

Of course we all know that there is far more going on here than meets the eye!