Yeah I know, the term kill line isn't used by s at all and the china watching 'journos' either can't translate for shit, or didn't do enough research into gamer culture to find or understand a localised term. They could have even looked to shooters or other games where 1hp/one shot/one hit (from death) or similar would also have been oka and broadly understood. So the choice of the awkward term is deliberate.

There's also a phenomenon where Chinese netizens may translate their own terms into English in a bit of a deliberately playful or slapdash manner, mostly for fun (e.g. good good study, day day up and the western reporting just picks that up and runs with it as the 'serious' translation (see the 'lie flat' movement) or use an extremely accurate but technical and alienating term (see 'involution').

Basically western reporting will settle on the translation that 'others' the phenomenon or concept by making it seem infantile or esoteric. It's the 'acceptable' mockery of Chinglish for respectable publications like the NYT.

(Compare this to, for example, Forbes introducing, and explaining the term 'karoshi' 加劳死 'death from overwork'

But karoshi goes unspoken in the U.S. because the English language has no word for it.

We DO have a word for it. It's death from overwork. Our language doesn't work like german or japanese where we can slam so many nouns together to make infinitely long composite nouns, we add a space every now and again, so where they have 'one' word (which is really add + work + death) we have three 'words'

"Oh the inscrutable Japanese with their beautiful, tortured, unique untranslateable culture, we have to treat it respectfully by not translating the term into mundane English so we will use the romaji karoshi throughout the text."