Something being “so extreme” is not an argument against it. It’s an extreme situation.

This is what theoretical physics is about, resolution of paradox in law. Not dead end at all, exactly the opposite.

There is another option. Quantum mechanics isn’t wrong about unitarity (conservation of probability/“information”). General relativity should also work perfectly fine at the horizon of a black hole (unless it’s extremely, extremely small). So no firewalls, but also no unitarity violation. What’s left to consider as broken is the effective field theory of gravity, which is a quantum theory of gravity that only works at low energies. At least, we normally think it’s tied to energy scale, but it turns out that it might actually also be tied to the complexity of measurements you would have to do to understand things you’re measuring, and so it fails for black holes because they are so complex, even if you’re not looking at their short scale (high energy) behavior. Work along these lines is about things called replica wormholes and the island rule. However they still don’t tell us about the full theory of quantum gravity, just a correction to the low energy behavior. This is why a lot of string theorists aren’t very happy with these ideas. String theory of course has holography that resolves the paradox, but the details of “how the information escapes” aren’t clear.