A lot of tedium is added into these games to force the player into spending real money for skips & access to content. It is a valid way to incentivize customers into paying for given service, but also means there are many time wasting repetitive tasks that can ruin the experience if one does not grasp the concept of "when the game starts getting tedions, you are supposed to pay"
You're very much off the mark there. That may be true for gacha games or similar slop from the 2020s, but Runescape2/OSRS never had any sort of pay to win, or pay to skip the grind. Neither did WoW for instance.
RS2/OSRS definitely did have grind, but only grind that you sought out yourself. I don't believe there is a single quest that requires level 99 woodcutting or firemaking, you do it to earn a little token that shows that you did the grind.
There was also botting for money-making purposes. Real-world money to buy items wasn't much of a factor but obtaining resources still cost time and effort that many players (including myself) didn't particularly enjoy when you can only spend so much time on a game every week.
Botting to level up skills kind of misses the point, in my opinion. What's the point of a skill cape if you didn't do the grind yourself? Botting to earn in-game money makes a lot of sense, though: skip the grind to be able to afford armour and go straight for the interesting quests and fights.
I think RuneScape's choice to lock content behind a paywall rather than connect real money to timers/in-game items was the right one.