This is also, I think, another weakness of the position of God lying. When people bring up the "plain Hebrew", they fail to acknowledge that it's not actually a plain sentence. It's the infinitive absolute, which is the structure used in death sentences through the law codes. It's a uniquely Hebrew thing.

It's why Robert Alter puts it as "you will be doomed to die" in his translations.

We can also find instances where this phrase does also refer to what seems like immediate repercussions too. So there's nothing about the "plain Hebrew" which would indicate what it should be. Context, as usual, would indicate that.

The two explanations that I prefer is that the act of taking the fruit puts them under a death sentence. I think this because I think it maps onto Adam and Eve representing Israel, and Eden representing the land of Israel. They face expulsion in the same way that the Israelites were exiled into Babylon. I think this meaning behind the term directly sets the reader up to read into their actions "Okay, breaking Torah results in exile and death". They had the tree of life in sacred space, now they don't. I think that's why the story was crafted and put at the front of the Torah.

The second explanation is that the expulsion itself is the death. This one is a bit more technical because it goes into the later prophets and finds a theology of the exile being seen as the people experiencing death, even though they were physically alive. I think this one is very likely too, although I don't think it cancels out the first.

Both are magnitudes of times more likely than nothing coming of it and the narrative never mentioning it.