This thread isn't a matter of what makes more sense, or what actually happened. It's a matter of what people were speculating was going to happen.
And I'm sorry, but speculating that Oda, after 25 years of never having the Straw Hats kill anyone, was all of a sudden going to have one give a human character, a massive, gory death, on panel, is, in my opinion one of the dumbest predictions we've had.
There was no way Oda was going to paint the Straw Hats in that light. They've never been the traditional Pirate crew. Even when they did something "villainy" like "steal the gold" from Skypiea, Oda offset it, by having the villagers trying to give them the gold, unbeknownst to them.
It's not the image the Straw Hats have built up in the World, and Oda wasn't going to tear down what he had built up over the course of the entire serialization, just because. The people who know the Straw Hats, know them as good people. That's how they are perceived by those whose lives they've helped. Imagine Oda throwing that out the window, and delivering the news "Zoro decapitates a Pirate on Wano." It was never going to happen, because it completely shatters the people's perception of the Straw Hats that has been built up since chapter 1.