Everyone's play style is different. For me minecraft has always been about what I can do to push the technical bounds of the game. For example when I was playing 1.25 on a vanilla server it was building a huge enderman farm in the end so I could get easy XP and enderperls. And part of that build was little grindy and it cost me several lives and tools due to falling into the void. But in the long run it was worth it. Modded minecraft has just extended this type of play style for me.