I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it’s a bad game. Don’t do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you’ll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent’s cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
You don’t need to grind though to play the story and exploration. You only need to farm artifacts when you want to get all 36 stars in the Abyss every two weeks, which isn’t necessary or connected at all to the story.
You can literally play the whole game with the characters you get for free if you only want to experience the story.