Does anyone think they would have felt differently about the end of Episode 6 when you had to make a choice if:
For me personally, no. The issue that I have is the sudden change of the plot. What started as romance ended up being a thriller out of nowhere. There was no gradual change, it was just romance then BAM Peter showed up in your house, then BAM BAM your house is on fire and someone died, then BAM BAM BAM whoopsie there's a psycho killer LOL.
So it's not really about the presentation of how one girl died. It's more about the change of the genre itself.
People would mostly be sad if one girl has to die, but it could be ok if the game continued into drama about how MC and the other girl survived and coped with the situation. Instead, it turned into a badly written and badly presented thriller about a surprise killer. Episode 8 would be the closure, but I'm not going to be surprised if it ended up being the worst episode where the conclusion sucked (all the girls died), or dev retconned and tried to save face by giving troll ending (e.g.: "it's all just a dream, everyone is alive and well, here's some threesome sex scene").
I'm also suspicious that dev has just switched focus onto their next game.