If you cannot complete a task cause you aren’t strong enough, you have to either grind for exp or get better gear by collecting pointless objects and doing the list based crafting.
These things have nothing to do with any story progression and just suck up time and that’s the point of the meme. You can perfectly design a game that uses less lazy ways of giving players a rewarding feeling that don’t hold off the story line or take loads of time.
There is nothing wrong with gamers that want to have this, it’s that every game that goes this route is not for a lot of casual games so it’s not nice that almost every rpg goes this route.
Why I’m dragging pay to win into this, I don’t know. Frustration with current generation games probably 😆 Also that they want you to spend lots of time in the game so you would spend more money in it, while I want to just play 1-2 hours and have a nice experience and story.