My favorite MMO is Guild Wars 2. While it certainly has grind available, it doesn’t require it to play the content. It genuinely respects your time and understands people have lives outside of gaming, and tries to give a lot of options for ways to progress so you can focus on content you enjoy. There’s a lot of communities, guilds and activities to do with others. You can join 5 guilds at once, if for instance you wanted to join a group of friends, a big guild that does events together, another one that does raids, another based on your identity or location etc.

It kind of throws you into the deep end when you start, and suffers from layers upon layers of developed complexity thanks to add-ons and content updates over the years, but for a certain type of person it will really click. It’s free to try so you might as well see if you like it.