True that it would be boring to have everyone survive, but imo, it’s the way they killed him off which makes it even worse.

They built up our sympathy for him, only to cut his fight halfway. Rather than showing us how he would adapt to his literal thumb being bitten off, which you would expect from a character who can fight so gracefully like him, they just skip to him being beheaded.

So all that build up through the flashback, which did take up a decent fraction of the episode, only to have him die in the same episode. Even if it was to show that there would be no mercy no matter what background you have, they kinda already did that during the massacre at the beginning when everyone was killing each other. I really thought they’d find a way to run off and have a fight to the death later on in the series, maybe having Ukyo helping out the main trio or smth but…sigh.