I haven't found the game to be grindy except at the very beginning before I had met more than a couple of characters and there wasn't that much to do. Once I had Prim, Yui, and Maxy, I was on my way, with more coming soon after.
It is slow to make money, but so far I've not needed much money. I've made sure to work on the reputation of the restaurant and prepping myself for eventual gambling. Getting my stats up for that is also slow, but there's so much else to do in the meantime.
In trying to make money and do events to move the story forward, almost nothing feels repetitive (Sleeping or talking with Yui at night got a little repetitive early on, but they're fairly short scenes and I was happy enough to do them over a few times until something new happened with her.)
In contrast, other games I've played (that I won't name) have crazy grind where progressing the story is at times extremely painful and even when you are progressing you get repeating scenes with lots of dialogue that you have to skip through because nothing changes.
