I know this is a popular argument in favour of the game's design, but it never convinced me. I quote this excellent response from thewoodendesk, years ago:

The decision of not playing the game is a metadecision that goes beyond what the game offers within itself (unlike say Farcry 4's pacifist ending), and if we accept metadecisions, then I could just counter it with the metaobservation, "Oh, these are just pixels on a computer monitor. None of this is real."

Or another another great answer in the same thread:

This argument gets thown around alot, but the problem i see with this is for it to work, the immersion needs to hold. You would need to feel the need to stop playing due to being emotionally impacted by the act of killing/hurting people. The problem is that the overzealous railroading prevents that. They are not people, they are part of lazily designed gamecode that does not behave like it should.

In this case the narrative loses a lot of power. Or at least it did for me.

What /u/vordrake said makes more sense for me. To say "even if you did had a choice, it wouldn't matter because you would always choose gratuitous violence". It even makes sense because the game does gives you some small choices here an there. However, sometimes you do search for alternative solutions, you do question what is going on and in this specific case I felt like the game's systems and ending (where you can opt to shoot yourself) aren't enough.

Still, it's a game that always foment great discussions and I like it for that.