LOL wut?
The whole point of Dark Souls is that the game is hard, but (except a few instances) not annoying.
When Dark Souls forces you to repeat a segment of gameplay (i.e. you die and have to repeat a section of a level, or a boss fight), it's because you, the player, haven't yet obtained the skills required to move forward. Each time you repeat a section of content, it's meant to have you improve as a player and obtain those skills. And once you obtain the aforementioned skills, you can generally apply them to overcome later challenges.
Grinding, on the other hand, is just repetitive tasks, with a higher volume of things to do, and with no skill component (or if there are any skill components, they're minor optimization details that let you grind slightly faster). Grinding does not lead to player improvement, and it doesn't give you tools you can use elsewhere. When you're done grinding one thing and move on to the next, it's back to square one: the gameplay "reward" for grinding is just more grinding.
For instance, in RuneScape, you level woodcutting by chopping trees, which you do by just clicking on them every once in a while and letting your character chop automatically. You as a player can't get better at this. Levelling up woodcutting allows you to chop higher level trees for more exp/hour, but you also need exponentially more exp to level up, so it still gets longer and longer each time. Once you're done with woodcutting and want to move on to your mining skill or whatever, your woodcutting level means jack shit: you gotta start over from scratch.
RuneScape is grinding; Dark Souls isn't.