I agree with the writer's stance with grinding, and I also felt the same way about Persona 5's Mementos which did a good job at giving me a clear objective to work toward as I climbed through it.
I think grinding is fine if the goals are tangible and the effort toward it is rational. In MMOs I've played, I've had to do certain raids once a week for a couple of weeks on top of doing dailies in order to get tokens that I could use to purchase gear that would make the raids easier. There was a weekly cap on tokens, and there was a limited amount of quests that gave tokens in one day. The raids themselves had weekly lockouts.
While collecting tokens, I was able to get lucky and get stronger gear from drops in the raids, which reduced the amount of things I needed to buy. On top of that, I could also learn how to craft gear I bought with my tokens over time.
To me, that grind felt respectable.
Another respectable grind is what I encounter in older Harvest Moon games and Stardew Valley. These are games where you're literally farming for income. The more income you get, the more money you can invest to increase your income. You go from having less than a thousand gold and only being able to purchase a few bags of seeds to being able to have a ton of avenues to get more money concurrently.
A game that does grinding wrong is Destiny 2, where you grind for purely RNG distributed loot with no way to alter said RNG over time, such as by raiding with the same people repeatedly and over time everyone gets a piece of loot by having a raid leader distribute it. No. Instead, you get random loot and tokens that most of the time will give you loot weaker than your current power level.
It also doesn't help there's no feeling of getting more powerful in Destiny 2, which makes the grind pointless - a grind for the sake of grinding.