Yeah, Serious Sam argument is totally different context.yeah, you might have a point if that was the only thing in game, and most shooters don't give you an option to defeat a boss without killing them. The context was the announcer saying, kill her? or don't kill her, your cyberpunk, your choice. This is showing you can choose the values of your character.
I have seen these things come up every now and then I recall reading these on Mass Effect forums too. It was about that choise between two soldiers didn't matter because you get either of them anyway, and when someone pointed out that if it played differently it would be linear but then argument got back to point "but there's no choice" like nothing happened. Same with Krogan character you could kill or spare. Consequences were to have or not have him in squad after that and IIRC there was no replacement for it. It still was classified as linear as there were no further consequence. People said that you had less option for squad but for some reason choice folks just said that was not valid consequence.
I recall they finally pissed some people of with their drivel and some folks threw scenario for them. If certain actions should have certain outcome. After watching that argumentation for couple of days I left the forums for months. If order of revealing something should influence the outcome, scenario was a scratch lottery coupon but in... SPACE!!!
In Cyberpunk 2077 and other story driven games, if character death doesn't work out as consequence, even when there are even major chained consequences (Takemura lives / dies -> Hanako) then it's about something else. That not everybody connects to the game world and events in there through characters. This presents a problem in terms of realistic writing because in the end what are private or public institutions, legal or illegal, corporations, police, gangs in the end but group of people performing relevant tasks to fulfill the goal of institution, portrayed through characters.
Paragon / Renegade meter in Mass Effect didn't bother me, it sort of was there and in the Outer Worlds there was a graph player could access, graph presented player relationship with different factions and I checked it like perhaps 3 times in my playthrough. I don't want anything like that to Cyberpunk 2077, I really don't see it would work for me, but perhaps it's lack of presentation like that, that is real reason for some of these arguments.