A bit off topic, there's one old Colville video where he talks about one time when some of his player's characters died because they were put in a situation where they had to surrender and he had crafted a way for another player to get them out but the captured players decided to resist instead despite that making no sense and he was forced to do the logical thing and kill them.

And he kept going on and on about how that was a massive failure of his as a DM and how that should never happen and I just kept thinking, isn't that only true if you didn't have a pre-campaign talk explaining what kind of game you were going to run and then you did something that openly contradicted that?

I'm seeing kind of a trend in a lot of comments that kind of superficially acknowledge the almost infinite types of play styles but always seem to prop up just the playground, nominal challenge style of play.

I don't know, I think a super realistic, brutal and gritty campaign can be as fun as anything else provided everyone at the table has been informed about it and has accepted it. The failure is not managing properly player expectation.