The AUDIENCE gave everything Captain/Ms. Marvel related the financial middle finger. They have nothing to gain keeping these characters around and everything to lose if they don't make a very tangible show of "we have heard you and will do better". Plus they need them out of the way to explain why Carol isn't solving every problem by brunch.
She doesn't even have to kill them. Just have them go poof in a puff of smoke and Rogue has 1 vision of the three Marvel's in a pocket dimension getting a mani/pedi, remarking on how nice it is to finally take a break. Then Rogue can always split one off 5-10 years later if needed because a green comet flew by or whatever silly shit a COMIC BOOK SHOW needs to justify anything. No need for Rogue pathos or any of that.
You do realize by giving Rogue three sets of powers, two of which she didn’t even have in the comics, you’re basically having them repeat the same mistake they did with Emilia Clarke at the end of Secret Invasion AKA one of the, if not the, dumbest decisions in the MCU?
Also, Carol solving problems? She’s outside of Earth most of the time, her existing doesn’t cause a problem for X-men stories. If anything, powerful characters active on Earth like Dr. Strange would be more of an issue, but they can always hand wave it away as “they’re busy” as they have always done. Mind you, I don’t even like Carol, but that’s more due to Brie not even trying anymore in the role (and she can act well as seen in non-Marvel films, she’s clearly got some Jennifer Lawrence attitude when Lawrence decided to stop trying as Mystique), but I see no need to kill her off when one can just have her out in the universe far away.
And no, historically in the comic book world, showing disrespecting to characters simply because their sales are lower has not ended well. When the Ultimate Marvel universe comics sell started dwindling, Jeph Loeb wrote the infamous event Ultimatum that permanently killed off tons of characters with the plans to bring in a bunch of new characters to give readers a fresh start and boost sales. Instead, sales went down further and eventually they just had to get rid of the Ultimate universe (Ultimate Spider-man was the only one not affected as Brian Michael Bendis did not allow the event to affect his series, and Miles obviously went on to join the main verse). Instead getting better writers to tell better stories with these characters, they went the lazy “just kill them” route like you suggested and lo and behold it failed.
Because if they’re willing to kill off characters in a mean spirited way just because their sales went down, whats stopping them from doing the same to a character you like when that character’s sales hypothetically go down? It sets a bad precedent, and if they do this, no, they did NOT hear us and did NOT do better, instead they took the lazy route instead of actually utilizing good writing.
Now, take Green Lantern and Geoff Johns. In the 90’s, there was an infamous storyline where after his home city is destroyed, Hal Jordan goes insane, begin thinking like a mad god, murders all the Guardians and fellow Lantern Kilowog, and only “redeems” himself by sacrificing himself to save everyone from another threat.
This brought in new Lantern, Kyle Rayner, and understandably, fans of Hal were very unhappy. So Geoff Johns came in to fix this by resurrecting Hal and also revealing Hal had been possessed by an entity called Parallex and was not in control of his murderous actions. But he kept Kyle around and active as well, saying in an interview you don’t shut out one group of fans just to please another, that’s bad business and not a good way to treat your fans.
Like, even if her show underperformed (but hey, maybe next time don’t release it alongside a new Star Wars show, for fucks’ sake!), Ms. Marvel had people who liked her show and her in particular. Why throw ANY amount of good will away for actually no reason? Yes, now is not the time to have her leading her own big budget film, but there’s no good reason she can’t appear in a Young Avengers film or show with Peter Parker and Kate Bishop. And yes, maybe a hypothetical Season 2 of Ms. Marvel, but this time give us a more compelling villain (The Inventor would have been a fun Season 1 villain, he was great in the early comics) and directors who know how to make actually good action scenes (this goes double for Moon Knight, those “action” scenes were embarrassing to look at).
A character having a smaller set of fans should not be reason for the writers to go out of one’s way to piss off those fans and ignore them.
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