A heartwrenching scene in which an important character suffers the loss of their only parental figure due to that parental figure's absolute unwillingness to deny their familial bond? That scene would never be drawn in 2021 OP.
Obviously the relationship between Yasu and Toko pales compared to that of Nami and Bellemere, but it still is something out of the normal for Oda’s writing.
What Yasu shows is that Oda is breaking his usual conventions. The same way he broke them in Marineford. Characters don’t die in the present day, that’s Oda’s general rule. Flashback, fair game, current story, nope.
Yasu breaks that pattern. In other arcs, Yasu would be fine. Like Pagaya surviving his apparent death to save his daughter Conis. That’s the more apt comparison than the Nami-Bellemere one. Here we actually got an onscreen, present day death, and unlike other situations, we actually ended up with both a corpse and a grave. If Yasu comes back from this, it will shit all over Pell as the worst death fake out Oda has ever done.
Oda has already killed a character this arc. If he can kill off Yasu, he can kill off Kaido. Whether he has the balls to go through with a main character like Zoro doing it, that’s the real question.