I love the grid, but if you follow the grid too strictly, all your music will sound sterile and lifeless. Especially if all the instrumentation is programmed. Maybe a real drummer playing to a click track can help avoid that.
I don't think the grid is the problem, it just happens that it's very easy in DAWs to make patterns that are very short (e.g. a 1-2 bar loop) and then arrange them in these 1-2 bar units. Very likely that will sound a bit stiff, repetitive and predictable, which works in some genres but not others.
Personally, trying to think in patterns that only repeat at 4-8 bars helped me out avoid that, while still using the grid.
Of course you can. But if you can only make music with a grid - in fact if you can only imagine music with a grid - that's not necessarily ideal.
Ableton is actually textbook modernism - mechanised regular repeating patterns, both in the GUI and in the kind of music it encourages.
Which is fine as far as it goes - as long as you realise there are other possibilities, and that that kind of modernism is more than a century old now.
The notion that music is at all a grid is just ... not true. It’s true of a tiny subset of music.
I use ableton (and grids) all the time but this way of thinking about “music” is just reinforcing a weird picture of what it is.
Even scales and theory and even music notation enforce a confusing deconstruction of what music is.
But it’s really hard to articulate this.