how does that prevent ending a chapter there? it doesn't matter if the chapter ends there or not, the problem is 2 significantly diverging paths which almost doubles the amount of dev work and slows down progress significantly
hence it would make sense to get rid of his character even on the friendly path, yes, some players will grieve for few minutes because of losing their buddy and maybe make some angry comments on the internet, yet the world will still move on, he can suffer some medial issue, car accident, work accident, alien abduction, whatever, just get rid of him so you don't have to make 2 separate sets of scenes and renders and can progress with the main story, use the opportunity to introduce a new character if you have to, or create new drama
the problem IMHO, which I spoke about in another bb thread, is that devs thinking they have to rely on the feedback and let patreons dictate the script, that is just lazy and creates lots of other issues down the road, not to mention the loudmouthes will never be satisfied with the development either way, instead of having your own story development arc and timeline, sticking to it, and revealing step by step what to expect in nearest couple updates, which helps to avoid inconsistencies which plague these games because different event progress doesn't line up and you have to introduce complex code to deal with it, which, as previous examples show, leads to bugs in the game play almost 100% of the time and then becomes the excuse to start things over...
