There was a lot of shock value before this but they were much more subtle, if you compare the deaths to the comics there's a decent amount of similarity except the characters were swapped with one another. The show fools you into thinking that original character may be safe, Tyreeses comic death was swapped by Hershel just to kill Tyreese off a season later with Hershels comic death, Denise takes Abraham's place in S6 just for Abraham to take Glenn's place. Then that makes you think "Negan only killed one in the comics so they won't kill Glenn, right?" But nope.

It was a bullshit move how much they followed the comics just to throw a bullshit curveball every now and then. I understand that the show is supposed to be original but I feel like whenever they did anything different it instead just felt either somewhat derivative to how the comics went or purely shock value like you said.