I liked grinding, actually.
Call it padding all you want, but it was nice to have to earn every level on every pokemon I wanted to train. It wasn't "hard" but it sold the experience in a way that the new games just don't anymore. Its not even just the exp share, but stuff like autobattling, exp candies, and so on, just make it way too easy to rocket the levels of your pokemon way up with minimal effort. Sure, you could technically always grind up to be overleveled, but before it took an amount of time and effort that felt fair, it felt like a sufficient barrier. Nowadays, there's no barrier anymore, you have to actively choose not to overlevel yourself because its so easy to do so that the only reason not to is an intrisic desire to avoid making the game too easy. It really hollows out the experience in a way I'm not a fan of, personally.