I think people are struggling to accept these plot points because from the players perspective, Joel was just looking out for his daughter-figure basically, and they killed throughout the game to survive, so them getting brutalized is just 0-100
This isn't like hypothetically, say MG gets remade, and we play as Solid Snake and kill Big Boss, a character we played as for multiple entries. In that case killing an iconic main character you played as would make sense since BB is a POS
Joel was just trying to get by lol