Consider the economy of storytelling.

Developing a character takes time. Evolving a character takes time. It requires words in your story to accomplish these things.

That time and those words are units of currency in the storytelling economy. At any particular time, your story is doing some small number of things. During that time, it is not doing other things. Character development is spending currency; spending time on a set of characters is time not spent with another sets of characters.

The idea with writing is that you aren't spending this time currency willy-nilly. You are investing it. And like with any good investment, you are expecting some form of dividend or payoff in the future.

If you unceremoniously kill this character after investing in them, without getting the payoff from that character, then that investment has essentially been wasted. Time spent developing a character whose death serves no or little purpose is time that could have been spent on other things.

Of course, "payoff" can happen in many forms. And there are ways to make terminating a partially-developed character a worthwhile investment in a story. But more often than not, this is a simple mistake. It's just not a sound investment strategy to spend a bunch of words on a character whose character arc is cut off before it can conclude.

This is true for many other aspects of storytelling. The plot of most stories doesn't end before achieving at least some kind of climax. That climax is the payoff for all of the investment in the story up until that point. Simply ending a story 2/3rds of the way through, leaving the plot, characters, and/or themes unresolved, is not a sound investment strategy.

Consider your example, seen through the lens of storytelling economy:

Why aren't multiple characters developed simultaneously, randomly being killed off, with just a random dude from the neighbouring village surviving the carnage?

OK, so you're developing multiple characters. Well, the size of your work does not change, so the more characters you develop, the less currency you can spend on each one. Which means the less investment you have. So killing them off doesn't really lose much individually.

But killing almost all of them off means that in aggregate, you've lost the vast majority of your character investment. And if the person who survives the climactic encounter is "a random dude from the neighbouring village", then that person will have no or minimal investment in them.

Which means that, after spending all of that currency on character development, the storyline payoff is... nothing.

It's not impossible to make such a story work, of course. But you're really marching uphill. In the snow. During a blizzard.

Surprising the reader is not the primary goal of a work. Entertaining the reader usually is. Some readers may find surprise inherently entertaining, but few find it entertaining if you stop in the middle of a sentence.

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