@lain alien planet man
Even as a kid I never did that. Even pokemon felt too grindy to me I, I bypassed every trainer I could, never battled wilds and just powered through it with my starter. (I wasn't very good at it)
When I played some gba romhacks on an emulator years later, I played "properly". Because the emulator had a 4x speedhack. In the original, they put in the option to disable animations (the cool part) so you could do more grinding (the dumb part) in the same time.