Yeah, I'm definitely not on board with arbitrarily wiping any members of the party you don't have with you. Imagine my surprise, going into DOS 2 blind, when that happened, after I broke my back getting all of the comps personal stuff done before we got on the ship. I was not a happy camper.
I don't think DOS2 doing that even added anything to the game in the long term besides an excuse to replay it. The whole 'dead party members come back to fight you for one battle' at the end of act 3 just came off as comedic more than anything else, because they got killed off so early that during my first playthrough, I had already forgotten what the deal with them was.
If anything, it basically kneecapped the last quarter of the game, given that all of the major antagonists during the last arc of the game were closely tied to specific party members.
