It really depends on how in a hurry your are. As opposed to some other games, you are never stopped in your actions because you just lack some direly needed materials, and then your very actions have to focus on collecting said materials.

To give an example from the stone age in game: you can either keep on exploring whole low-level areas further away from your "base" (Meadows, Black Forest), while collecting the materials needed to upgrade your gear to finally access higher-level areas more easily (or more reallistically), all the long, OR you can wish exploring any area "near your base" as soon as possible, whatever their difficulty in term of fights, let alone survival, and in this case, you need to repeat actions in order to collect said materials.

In the fomer case, resource collecting can be defined as a relativelly seamless process, though you need to find a solution to empty your inventory always, anyways, and I wouldn't call it "grinding". You could still call it "grinding", if you want, but only an "easy grinding", then. If you want numbers, the weight allowance makes it so that you are limited to 2 stacks of raw, heavy materials in your character's inventory (wood, stone), in absence of any other transport mean in the stone age. It's up to you if you absolutely prefer exploring and returning to your base every time you are full (with like 1 stack of heavy materials seamlessly collected during your run, but could be more), OR you best prefer to set up a serial of noria trips, returning only 2 stacks of heavy material each time, plus whatever resource you might find in your way.

The same if you are in a hurry to build a splendid and vast base, as you can see on some videos. Do you want all the required materials in but a couple (or a handful) of in-game days, prior to start building, or as the result of in-game weeks of exploration? The difference is in the amount of grinding you'll perceive in real life (what you essentially do during your gaming sessions).