... To me, a "death pit" teleporting the player instead of killing them feels like a way of saying "I know this section is kind of janky, so I'll just give you a handicap for it rather than adjusting the actual content." It also messes with the visual language of the game - if the warp at least didn't *look* like a death pit it would be more acceptable imo.
That said, lives do feel incredibly outdated in the year 2020. ...
Regarding the issue of consistency in player communication: My personal position is that the lives system should be eliminated completely and players should be allowed an unlimited number of retries at a segment. I want this everywhere, for every game, forever.
SRB2's lives system basically creates this resource/economy game where you have to grab as many lives as you can, knowing that the last stage in the game will be very hard and you will die a lot. I personally spend a lot of time in GFZ trying to grab lives, so that I can head into THZ with ~15 lives (and I don't worry about life collection after that point).
In comparison, games like N++ and Super Meat Boy give you infinite retries, and they have "checkpoints" often (actually just short levels), and they make you mash a hard segment over and over again.
Because of SRB2's lives system, you can't make the player mash a hard segment, because it'll game over them. From a level design standpoint, this creates a really odd question for me: Is a difficult section supposed to test a player's competence at that immediate challenge; or is it supposed to create an risk of death that compounds into a risk of game over?
Granted, after mashing Haunted Heights, I was a lot more proficient with the disappearing-platforms gimmick when I returned to the stage. I think that refining a micro-level proficiency (passes platforming challenges) created a macro-level proficiency (low risk of game over).
Granted, removing lives would create a lot of new work for the level designers, because right now lives are one of the main rewards for exploration. I don't think it's right for me to demand work from other people, so I'll stay satisfied with the game we have.