As an avid adventure gamer back then, not really. Way too slow to qualify as "grinding". Adventure games back then had a low number of useless items that had no

As an avid adventure gamer back then, not really. Way too slow to qualify as "grinding". Adventure games back then had a low number of useless items that had no impact on the plot; it was more about figuring out, when you found a new item, how it might solve some earlier problem. The best games were clever about how items could be combined, and only in rather few cases were the combinations unintuitive (and it was typically for comedic effect, especially in LucasArts games).