I think a debate between narrative or gameplay is flawed, if one doesn't support the other than you're making two games, one a visual novel and another tabletop war game. D&D is a combination of both and a D&D game's combat and narrative should support each other, though the uninteresting combat in 5e is a common complaint.
Personally I value a narrative more than the gameplay the same way I'll overlook a comic's art because I'm invested in the story (to a point), if anyone here played Greedfall, I was interested in the story being told there (especially because there is a serious shortage of sail and sabre rpgs) but because the combat was so uninteresting and repetitive I still haven't finished that game, there's really no pay off to the narrative portion of the game when the combat is so uninteresting, that would be true whether or not I could skip it.
Giving me a setting to turn off the difficulty or by-pass combat all together means to me that the game either doesn't have interesting combat or hasn't given the player adequate ways to work around a 'combat as fail-state' puzzle.
