Yeah, I get that. That's the root of impressive fighters in battle shonen. Heck, Fist of the North Star is the series that coined "You don't even know, you're ALREADY DEAD!". It's littered with non-fights with a GAWDLIKE lead, the very Savior of the Century's end, who'se got a brother than is an actual anime design parallel to Jesus, and yet it still sold it's cause and effect well. Kenshiro and Co. let people try their best, because they knew crushing them
after they exhausted their options, had much more impact than just murdering on sight.
In HxH it's just... bad bits of direction, more than anything. The situations, cast, music, and world exist to tell a more rounded account of events. But much is plainly, 100 percent one sided, and it really feels like the point of anything that's NOT the main cast is simply to make a select few look beyond amazing. Which spits in the face of a world that is so casual about death, that you have a school that trains the best of the best of the best, with only the survivors making it.
We have a 13 villain group, and beyond differences in Nen and silhouettes, they blend into one wad of "overwhelming superiority".
Even minor things like killing stragglers as they manage to escape for mere moments, or having the weakest troupe member incur injuries during this chaos, would have more cause-and-effect to it than what they've presented with these slaughters, or in this show in general.
Therefore it comes off like less of a full story, and more a collection of well animated / drawn / scored shocking moments. What could be excellent, feels middling, IMHO.
Unova was killed by Kurapika, and Gon and Kil escaped Nobunaga. But those things feel so insignificant, compared to the huge wall of perfection via body counts and lack of ANYTHING shaking them. Even their tearful mourning for the death of a friend is answered by little more than "MORE EXCUSES TO KILL!"
It'd have been nice to have seen them be sloppy and emotional due to mourning, but we (so far) didn't even get that. (Is this something that will happen? It'd mellow things out a bit if it does.)
The show / story would be
so much better if it just chilled a bit, curbed the HUGE kill counts and beheadings and twisted heads, (even before the increased violence, it was still bad about how it treated death), and let us (and the in-show world) come to natural conclusions about things, instead of pushing the desired answer with absolute, brutal clarity. We're 51 episodes in (!!!), and I'm just... shocked at the fact they haven't gotten more relaxed about this.