Adding new observations to this:
600 hours and 5 months in I still don't understand the point of these deaths vs hazard wipes. The more information I find out and confirm, the more confused I get.
For the sake of simplicity, I will be talking in the context of "deaths that happen due to player damage" e.g. players beating other players.
Important things I've learned overtime:
The devs actually changed the Deaths in Sports Modes (Football, Soccer or Buzzball), maybe a month after this thread was created. Now instead of a death with no respawn, it's a long time KO with your screen blurring. Essentially this is a camouflaged/bandaided death, which I don't know why it was done instead of just banning the death condition (I suspect game logic/engine issues), but it's better than just dying with no way to respawn like back then.
Either it was changed, or players just got better, but taking people off the Typhoon guard rails stopped being a problem long ago (and with one of the late 2023 updates, you can no longer camp-stand in there as the water level will kill you because devs actually doubled down on the MAP HAZARD concept).
HP regenerates. If you watch my OP clips here, you can see me dying quickly, that happens because I get focused and receive too much damage in a short timeframe. If you stay away from combat (don't get hit or have your hp reduced in general) for some time, you will be able to withstand punishments again.
Damage intake is map based (as well as other variables) (most surprising part for me as this makes things all the more confusing). You can't die from player received damage on Conveyor as an example whereas you can die if you stay too long on the metal part in front of the conveyor belts. Why is this a thing on this map but not the others? Ironically, this exception makes playing the map a slog due to the initial conveyor belt speed, where you can always make a quick recovery until 1 minute is left on the timer or you get bomb blasted (or shot at with taser or ice gun). People just stand in front mostly avoiding the fights. More often than not it ends up in a last man standing scenario. There is also a semi-confirmed speculation that weapon damage differs from map to map, so for example in Lolipop Madness you can kill people with Lolipop weapon in 2-3 swings as opposed to other maps.
"Play dead" mechanic, whose sole reason for existence is related to the actual death mechanic, is not used by many, if it's used then the players who try it often perish shortly after, in general it does not seem to be useful, pretty much obsolete in matches vs experienced players.
At some point all weapons seemed to have more damage on them, but that was nerfed/reduced so you wouldn't die as often. Or maybe the regeneration rate was reduced. It hasn't been disclosed anywhere and it's honestly hard to tell. I can only speculate and go with the feel.
At present, in 2024, as per the latest version 1.5.3.0 we have this restored to those earlier values or somewhere close.
So now nunchuks can kill you in a couple hits (headshots and/or random), or you can kill people with 3 headbutts on the head when you are under the effect of Spinach, or Pan and Lolipop killing people quickly again (Ichiban is a good example).
The funny thing is the Shovel remains nerfed and will not kill anything as quickly as the other mentioned weapons. This leaves me wondering why it was nerfed in the first place if things are like this again now.
This is confusing, and I'm not sure what else to say besides that. I still personally believe that deaths should only be exclusive to map hazards. ¯\ (ツ)/¯
