People saying "he ded" didn't play the Reaper questline nor viewed the dev streams where YoshiP himself said to pay extra attention to the avatar.
We hardly had any proper camera view on the avatar, let alone anything interesting about his avatar, yet. As for the reaper quest, well just do it and you'll see.

I hardly believe they'd do a full redesign of a character just to kill him in a few cutscenes. With his last words literally being an unfinished sentence.