Why, with the exception of daemon and aemond, all the major players of the dance die like chumps? Is it subverting a trope or just bad writing?

I’m not the biggest fan of the Dance of Dragons for this reason. All is a bit of an exaggeration – Roddy the Ruin, Rhaenys, etc. – but quite a lot of the war hinges on curb-stomp battles (and therefore chump deaths of people like  Otto Hightower and Criston Cole) that are pretty unsatisfying. It comes across as bad wrestling plotting.