The game really isn't that grindy, especially for a survival game. In my personal experience, the difference between this as most survival games is that the collection aspect doesn't really get lessened with advancement.

Say in another survival game once you've progressed a fair bit in tech, you might have some ridiculously easy way to collect tons of resources in one go and get them back to base super fast. In Valheim you're still going to be spending a lot of time chopping tress and smashing rocks if you want to do a lot of building. You also can't quick teleport ores back to base without a form of cheating (you can log off on one world with things on you, then relog to another and still have them).

But the threshold to advance is actually pretty low. So if you want to build compact and advance quickly, you can. If you want to build big, it's going to take time.