Oh yeah, totally agreed on this. I don't see Nat's death as a punishment in any way. It's just that she was the one who won her sacrifice-off with Clint. Taken on its own, I actually loved that scene; if you gotta have a character sacrificing themselves for a loved one, that was a really great scene for it. It didn't read as "redemption by death" to me at all. If it hadn't existed in a context where she was the only female OG team member and as a follow-up death to Gamora's (apparently not gonna be retconned) death in IW, it would have been actually a pretty good heroic death.

As the MCU losing one of its relatively few female characters AND the only major female superhero who's been around since Phase I, though, it's not a good look on them.

I do wish they'd given her a memorial at the end, or something, even a little scene a la Wash in Firefly.