Should anybody do business with the US, EU, China, Russia, etc?
It's crazy how millions are suffering in Yemen due to saudi/US/EU backed war and yet the entire media apparatus is going crazy over one person. Makes me wonder what's really going on here.
As you correctly observed, there is no political will in the US/UK/SA bloc to draw attention to Saudi-borne atrocities. This percolates down to major news platforms, contingent upon an implicit truce between Saudi Arabia and the media class. This was frustrated (although likely not severed) by the Khashoggi affair.
To address your larger concern - I am sympathetic to the argument that the most 'advanced' nation-states are no less complicit in 'barbaric' acts, war crimes, systemic violence, etc etc than those which more often receive scrutiny.
Even in this light, the Saudi example is exceptional: it's an explicitly anti-democratic hereditary autocracy with a medieval justice system having no concept of codification (other than deference to the Quran and Hadith) or legal precedent (rulings are inconsistent and case-by-case). Essentially any investment capital or financial dealings with the SA, the state, is directly debited to or from the Saudi royal family.
This is different from China and even Russia, for which one could make also the case that the state is insufficiently democratic, has arcane/draconian laws, etc etc, and that the money is likely to be siphoned off to oligarchs or state accessories. In fact, to your point, business with these countries _is_ often criticized - some would say to not a great enough degree. But drawing an equivalence on the basis of questionable state actions alone is, well, equivocating in this case.
Otherwise, this is just a case of the Saudi administration 'taking care of' one of their own who turned against them.
For the last few years, the Saudi regime has been kidnapping and imprisoning others who have done the same, only with limited external reporting and even less outrage.
BBC Newsnight had a fascinating report in this about a year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2KYQWPUbG4 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40926963 [transcript]
I think at issue is which killings are acceptable under “normalcy”. Obviously soldier/spy deaths are OK, sex workers are OK to kill since they’re by definition sinners, work-related deaths are OK for low wage workers as long as the injury is not acute, accidental military slayings are OK outside of developed nations because of the “we tried” doctrine, black kids are OK because black folks have “opted in” by choosing to commit more crime than whites, First Nations people are ok because they opted out of U.S. sovereignty...*
I think some people feel journalist killings are fundamentally a violation of normalcy.
* not saying I agree with any of that, but this is the mainstream consensus