To my eye, the Head Engineer dying from their massive land-juggernauts succumbing to the undeniable call of gravity works on multiple levels. If they were an invented OC, I think those levels would be a lot easier for people to engage with. But what people get hung up on is that it's Gotrek, and they feel Gotrek meeting his fate is something that should have more substance. But this is not the Gotrek that was one of the few survivors of a doomed expedition and stumbled across one of the fated axes of Grimnir, this is the Gotrek that was torn between love and duty and who ended up giving his life for a society that he didn't fit into. Instead of being the tragic figure of the worst slayer, Gotrek died as a paragon of modern Dwarven engineering - riding the razor's edge between proven design and necessity-demanded invention and being willing to die with the compromise he created if that's what it comes to. And where the more conservative of Engineers might get hung up on a one-in-three failure rate, the rest will see that the Expedition that Gotrek made possible set off to solve one mystery of a lost Karak and ended up solving two.
This Gotrek died younger, but he died happier, and his legacy is a much healthier one for the Karaz Ankor. Snorri is going to have a long and productive career protecting the newly-recovered hold of Karak Vlag and teaching them how to survive in the open world once more, instead of being so burdened with guilt that he hammers nails into his living brain. Gotrek's daughter is going to reach adulthood. And Grimnir's Axe is not the sort of artefact that reacts to a butterflying by shrugging and going 'well, I tried, guess I'll just sit here and rust for the rest of eternity, then'.
