The problem I have with these games is they are almost universally tuned to make them very time consuming and grindy if you don't pay.

That is, instead of the game being balanced for what feels good to play, they are balanced so that they feel good when you pay more and otherwise are not so annoying that you quit, but annoying enough to push you to pay.

Its not: here's a good game, but you can buy these things with real money. Its: here's a game that we purposely made a bit too time consuming and annoying, but you can buy these "time savers" to make it be fun all the time instead. Any game that sells real-money "time savers" is by definition a badly balanced game. The solution to a badly balanced game that becomes tedious is not to sell "time savers" (or skips: "buy the tank now and skip the grind for it"), its to rebalance the game to remove or reduce the tedium.