One arrives at different conclusions depending on how much the player knows about internal mechanisms of the game. Especially about gamestage.
Does the design of 7D2D expect the player to know that gamestage increases with your level and thereby autolevels the opponents as well?
If the answer to that is no, then xp is one of the carrots in the game and players will prefer activities that give xp, minmaxers will try to farm xp. Gamestage is then an internal balancing method, the player should optimally feel like the world is advancing and he has to keep up improving to deal with upcoming dangers. That is AFAIK the "normal" method of autoleveling, game designers would like to keep such details under the hood, but naturally it is hard to keep such a thing secret.
If the answer to that is yes, then players are incentivised to find and upgrade their gear, but avoid xp-generating activities. But players also want to have and try out new capabilities provided by perks. At least in my case it works out so that I ignore xp even if I consciously think about xp gain. Which I don't do generally anyway.
Even RPGs like D&D have a gamestage sort of progression rigidly fixed on player level. It is called a Dungeon Master, is operated by a meat bag and autolevels the enemies :smile-new: . It is assumed that the player does not know this, the secret is hidden away in the DM part of the manual and preferably not mentioned. If it weren't for new feats and spells to try out many players desire to make a level might be quite low when they inevitably find out that mechanism.
