I disagree. In games with excessive grind, it is often the case that the grind is made enjoyable and a key part of the game. I will use dynasty warriors as my example. So let’s look at this game.
Outside of beginner missions, a normal flight is 4-8 hours (without sim rate). Sitting there with autopilot on occasionally answering ATC for center transfers is not overly engaging from a gameplay perspective. We love flight sims, or we would not be here, so please do not suggest that maybe people don’t like them. You might also suggest to fly it manually for more engagement, but such an argument is not a realistic one. No one, is going to manually fly a flight that long, or at least some very extreme minority would just to do it.
So in this game, there is excessive grind with very little engaging game play. If there were not so much grind, one could ignore the latter. I don’t think you can look solely at the amount of grind in a game without the context within which the grind exists. There are games with A LOT more grind than even this, but the gameplay is also a lot more engaging. I don’t think many people statistically are going to want to sit in a 172 for 40-60 real life hours in career grinding the same unengaging missions.