Looking back at this Yoshi P statement(story spoilers)

[MikkoAkure]

There's a difference in killing off a character in a stand-alone game/story and killing a character off in a continuous story that is now 10 years old.

Especially from Shadowbringers onward, the Scions have been treated less as side-characters and more as the WoL's party members as if this were a single-player game. This was reinforced with the Trust system and with Ishikawa's comments in a recent interview:

Interviewer: The way the Scions have been depicted has changed a lot too.

---- Ishikawa says that one idea behind the Trust system introduced in ShB is that you can keep going on adventures with the Scions after the story is over. Yoshida says that back during the development of HW, Oda and [ARR/HW lead writer] Maehiro told him that they strongly want to recreate the feeling in classic FFs of going on a journey with party members, so they wrote the story of WOL, Alphinaud, Estinien, and Ysayle’s journey as a group of 4. This idea was developed further in ShB.

Most of the major character deaths we've had in FF have been from characters who either just showed up in the expansion they die in, or are introduced in the X.4 or X.5 patch before the expansion they die in. Exceptions are characters who have been around since ARR (or before) but were on the periphery and never really truly a part of the main crew and/or not developed well. At this point, the main core group of Scions we have now have been through so much together and are now so popular that I don't see them dying. Besides that, they've all had so many close calls that I feel like it wouldn't pack as much of a punch anymore.

[Jeeqbit]

Most of the major character deaths we've had in FF have been from characters who either just showed up in the expansion they die in, or are introduced in the X.4 or X.5 patch before the expansion they die in. Exceptions are characters who have been around since ARR (or before) but were on the periphery and never really truly a part of the main crew and/or not developed well. At this point, the main core group of Scions we have now have been through so much together and are now so popular that I don't see them dying. Besides that, they've all had so many close calls that I feel like it wouldn't pack as much of a punch anymore.

This echoes my perspective as well. We had a lot of deaths early on, all the way up to Stormblood, then it stopped unless they had just been introduced for the purpose of being killed.

Although some of these characters seemed like a part of our core crew, the entirety of our core crew were not developed and the purpose of 2.5 was to transform our bland, boring scions into characters with super powers. Y'shtola lost her eyesight, but in its place developed the power to see aether. Thancred lost the ability to use magick, forcing him to find ways to work around this disability. Yda was reminded of her history and her desire to see Ala Mhigo freed. Urianger already had a unique trait of being the know-it-all that lives in a library. Alphinaud and Alisaie were new to 2.0 so they had a plan for them already. Our friends were not bland anymore, but they didn't come up with a way to remove the blandness from all of them so they just killed them instead.

The way I take the lack of deaths after that is that they were not careful enough to begin with but as their experience grew they were better at avoiding death.

Ultima Thule was the perfect time to off them. They did their job and faced their demons. Yoshi and his team is too scared to take any kind of risks, it even shows in the content.

There just wasn't any point in it. With it being the end of the story, they could have killed them all off, or not. Either way, we probably won't see much of them again on our new adventure, so the only purpose killing them off would serve is to make us sad and depressed that so many of our favorite characters are gone. There wasn't any point making us feel sad at the end of the story.

I felt they had built up all of these characters over so many years and if they had just deleted them all in a split second like that, as I worried they had, I probably wouldn't quit, but I would have been questioning if I should, when all the character stories I had been following for all these years was almost deleted just like that.

[Jin-]

This echoes my perspective as well. We had a lot of deaths early on, all the way up to Stormblood, then it stopped unless they had just been introduced for the purpose of being killed.

Although some of these characters seemed like a part of our core crew, the entirety of our core crew were not developed and the purpose of 2.5 was to transform our bland, boring scions into characters with super powers. Y'shtola lost her eyesight, but in its place developed the power to see aether. Thancred lost the ability to use magick, forcing him to find ways to work around this disability. Yda was reminded of her history and her desire to see Ala Mhigo freed. Urianger already had a unique trait of being the know-it-all that lives in a library. Alphinaud and Alisaie were new to 2.0 so they had a plan for them already. Our friends were not bland anymore, but they didn't come up with a way to remove the blandness from all of them so they just killed them instead.

The way I take the lack of deaths after that is that they were not careful enough to begin with but as their experience grew they were better at avoiding death.

There just wasn't any point in it. With it being the end of the story, they could have killed them all off, or not. Either way, we probably won't see much of them again on our new adventure, so the only purpose killing them off would serve is to make us sad and depressed that so many of our favorite characters are gone. There wasn't any point making us feel sad at the end of the story.

I felt they had built up all of these characters over so many years and if they had just deleted them all in a split second like that, as I worried they had, I probably wouldn't quit, but I would have been questioning if I should, when all the character stories I had been following for all these years was almost deleted just like that.

Well they made me sad. Having to leave Zenos there alone and return to home with.... Those guys -_-

Anyways, imo it would have given more impact to the story. Like ME2 suicide mission which was incredibly exciting the first time I was playing it. I only mention this since the whole Ragnarok and mission is literally ME2 in FF colours