I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.