To a certain degree, there must be a buy-in on EP's conceit or else the game can't work. If for example someone's character is hardcore against sleeving because they believe it just copies the mind and the original dies, well, guess that's it when the rest of the party beam themselves to another planet to get a job done. If your character isn't willing to play along with some of the core concepts of the setting, they are effectively unplayable. So I don't hold it against the game that the characters need to fall into a certain mindset. But I do consider it ham-fisted that the game writes people who don't fall into that mindset as ignorant and/or evil rather than showing that there is merit in those concerns. There is no way whatsoever to tell if "you" survive uploading your mind to a new body. My opinion is that you don't and the other one is just a copy, but I've been in debates with people who make fair arguments that continuity of consciousness suffices as far as the universe is concerned, so I don't totally dismiss it out of hand. The game, however, does.
Altered Carbon (which I yet again reference here) seems to imply that people are actually inside their cortical stacks, i.e. that the organ of the brain in their bodies is not where their knowledge and personality are stored, but rather the alien hardware in their neck. With that, I'd be more inclined to believe that uploading and downloading yourself between cortical stacks actually preserves the person. In EP the cortical stack is primarily just backup storage that's constantly maintaining a backup of your brain's state, so anything that involves discarding the brain is going to lead me to conclude that that person is completely dead.
I mean, a follow-up problem is that if you do engage with the game's conceits, then you at best crack certain mechanics wide open, and at worst enable degenerate, world-shattering behavior.
It's not a failure to engage with the mechanics that lead to the massively-parallel-psychosurgery tricks; quite the opposite. It's the recognition that if you embrace the conceits of the game, if you treat your mind as software and attempt to program it, then you hollow out the concept of 'you' so far that you're playing a gimmick game, and most people won't be able to empathize with your character. Thus, the game won't be fun for most people, especially with multiple players.
As for myself, my own feelings are that death is a prolonged cessation of life, and since you can theoretically be restored from cold backup and be, in your subjective experience, exactly as though you had just timeskipped the period between your last read and the current write, then the question of death is pointless as asking if people are dead in cryosleep. Death doesn't matter; what matters is loss (or worse, subversion) of your data.
As mentioned previously, this is predicated on good-as-magic neural reading and simulation tech. But if the rules are bent enough to allow thermodynamic miracles to happen millisecond by millisecond, then expecting Biblical miracles as well is a side-grade of expectation at most.