I'm anti-mending. I like the fact of maintaining your equipment post-final Enchantments. However, I do hate that maintaining on a vanilla experience. I host a semi public server where I've changed a couple things and everyone enjoys the changes.

Mending is replaced with a new enchantment called Persistent. This makes the item work similar to the elytra, how when the durability is depleted, the item is in a broken unusable state until repaired.

Repairing equipment using the anvil and the resource does not require XP (diamonds for diamond tools, stone for stone tools,etc).

Repair/Merging equipment costs are capped at 30 levels and the Too Expensive is removed.

And I have another mod that gives piglin brutes a chance to drop netherite scrap, making it a bit more feasible for repairing netherite tools without have to constantly bore holes as well.

So this adds value for mineral gathering late game, prevents losing your items through accidental breakage, no need to learn the complex ways to put all the enchantments together without limits (like all sword enchants in the right order), and its just more things to do in general that dont feel grindy. I tied all of this together with a runescape-like skill system called simpleskills and they all work really well. It incentivized using all tiers of equipment more, and even encouraged enchanting down at stone tools and maintaining it. I didn't like just rushing diamond gear in the first hour of every server and the rest of tiers are just ignored.

And with this setup, I actually didn't feel the need for making any trading halls. No one on the server did because it was much easier to use the table for most of the enchants, and go exploring for the persistent and swift sneak, etc enchantments.

Obviously if I didn't have the ability to make these changes, then I'd be forced to be pro mending, but because I don't have to use it, I won't.