I'm not sure if this is a proper place to discuss WoW, but as a long standing player I can say that BfA is much better in terms of grinding than previous expansion Legion. You don't really need to grind anything, exactly because that grind is unrewarding and you was obliged to grind in Legion exactly because that grind was giving too much power. Again, according to my experience I'm not seeing big player exodus, most of those who started playing in my guild are continue to play, but that's only a personal anecdote, of course. Legion was much better in terms of perceived development cost: new gameplay systems, loads of new art and content, while BfA feels like cheap addon to build upon Legion investment, but that doesn't really makes it bad, it's just feels that they could do better.