If I understand correctly, the original D&D had rules for Combat and then for things that weren't directly Combat, but were still about fighting battles, like attracting or hiring henchmen, building a stronghold, controlling a territory and ultimately fighting battles with large armies.
Importantly, D&D predates Computer RPGs so all this wargmaing had to be managed by hand, and the rules involved a significant amount of crunch- what you call "a lot of tedium".
But then Computer RPGs (CRPGs) started to appear, invariably influenced by D&D, or other CRPGs influenced by D&D. So if you enjoyed crunchy, wargame-y, combat-oriented gaming, and didn't particularly need "narrative", then CRPGs were now your friend, and you didn't need to play D&D for that. For instance, I remember spending weeks and months playing Neverwinter Nights, which was pretty much just 3d ed. D&D with an automated GM.
That's how I understand OP's comment. And I kind of agree.
Interestingly, there seems to be a return to the original D&D mode of play with the "OSR" (Old School R... something) genre, that is discussed everywhere in this thread. Perhaps because OSR's rallying cry is "rulings, not rules" and maybe after a couple of generations of games with detailed mechanics designed to promote "narrative", players who just wanted to play a game without too many restrictions got bored with all the rules and wanted to go back to just telling the DM what they want to do, and then rolling the dice to see what happens. Which is the one thing that CRPGs can still. not. do.
Incidentally, one of the earliest RPGs of the 1980's was Call of Cthulhu which was very much designed to be "not about combat", but about experiencing a horror story, in H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos universe. There has been a clear split between games that are, on some level "about telling a story", or "about roleplaying" (so "narrative"), and games that are about killing monsters and nicking their stuff (so "Combat"), since the very early days of the hobby.
But, you know there's nothing stopping you from running a narrative-driven game in the D&D world, if that's more your thing (Ron Edward's "System Matters" nonwithstanding). Or, conversely, you can pick up a ruleset designed to "tell a story" and run it like a classic hack-and-slash dungeon crawl. To paraphrase the old joke about Fortran programmers, "The determined Real D&D Player can run a D&D session with any ruleset" [1].
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