Originally Posted by
JimRaynor55
They made the narrative. Chucking someone off the cliff to get the Soul Stone is literally an arbitrary, made up rule. Complying with it without question is also taking the Red Skull, an actual Nazi supervillain, at his word. If the writers wanted to create a loophole or reveal that Red Skull was just lying, they could've.
Also, Widow wasn't even the original choice to die. Articles that came out today reported that Markus and McFeely originally had Hawkeye dying. They changed it after getting input from the visual effects supervisor, so it's not like Widow (or anyone else) dying on Vormir was this all-important, unchangeable part of the plan.