There was a real threat that Picard would get killed off in Beat of Both Worlds.

I think the fact she got lightning-bolted by a sad puddle sort of ruined the dramatic impact of her death.

Soap-opera-ish is completely right - killing off a character is meaningless if you establish your writers will stoop to a fakeout or a never before mentioned sibling/twin (or clone or mirror universe version, since it's sci-fi).

I mean they killed her because they wanted to fire her, right? At least that's what I seem to recall.

I don't know if this is unpopular, but I wasn't a fan of her character or the writing. Not sure how to describe it. But the whole first season was kinda off.

The show runners of Discovery have talked about wanting to create a feeling that no one, not even series regulars, were safe. They referenced Game of Thrones in that discussion, but Yar is a great example and probably would have gotten a little more love from the community.

I agree completely. And Yar was a boring character anyway. The Romulan storyline was also pretty dumb.

It would be nice if the show was not afraid of killing named characters in general. Whenever someone dies it is almost exclusively a random character brought onto that episode just to die. Tasha Yar dying is more of an anomaly and never made the show feel like it had high stakes for me.

Oyster was full of great female characters and it came out before DS9