It's probably fairly common among people who want to be able to access content freely while preserving an internal sense of ethical behavior.

That's basically what I did with a certain popular TV series. I'd torrent the individual episodes, then buy the DVD box sets at the end of the season to pay for it. When it became clear that the writers didn't actually have any idea what they were doing (which was a topic of no small debate at the time), I stopped buying the box sets.

Whether I stopped torrenting it is neither here nor there, but let's just say that the peer comment ("The last season wasn't something I enjoyed, it was something that happened to me") really rung a bell with me. Later, the same story repeated itself with another popular show on a different network, at which point I just disengaged with TV for good.

I don't know if that was a joke, but Jon Snow is pretty clearly going to resuscitate in the books as well -- the exact way may not follow the TV show in detail, but it will in essence -- because he is important in GoT prophecy. I don't see this as pandering, any more than Gandalf surviving Moria is.

You could argue that season 8 was rushed, that some battles made no sense, that they botched the Night's King, or that Daenerys' character development was ruined by the abruptness -- though I think this too will play out similarly in the books -- but Jon Snow's resurrection was neither pandering nor the fault of HBO.