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I played Link's Awakening with my wife and daughter. My wife was taken back at the ending (surprised, not disliking). I think she basically just assumed the whole time that it wouldn't end with everyone on Koholint basically dying, or vanishing from existence.
This got me thinking about how I played this, or watched my brother play it, when I was the same age as my daughter. None of the media she consumes challenges her with difficult endings. Everything HAS to return to the status quo at the end, because we can't risk anyone being unhappy. In Frozen, Anna is unfrozen. In Moana, even Maui gets his fucking hook back after it breaks. Fake out deaths and fake out status quo changes happen left and right, but it is really rare to see something that actually sticks.
I love downer endings, and I think it made me who I am. It makes me sad and disappointed and a little disgusted to see basically all of the media of my kids' day be bland and not challenging them to really feel something other than a vague blandly happy dance party ending. Dance party endings aren't new, but have been made ubiquitous in the past 20 years. Same with fake out deaths, and I blame Marvel for that. I guess I personally chalk this all up to the general trend towards never making anyone uncomfortable, which is tied in with the corporatization of media and corporate-memphization of media.
I think of it like this. Watching a movie is like eating. The ending of a movie can be considered the terminal condition. You eat because you are hungry. You eat and eat until you feel full, and then you stop. Without that feeling, you would just continue eating forever. A movie works in a somewhat similar way. Something happens, a crisis or a problem appears, and the story continues until we reach a point where we feel that the original question has been answered and we can stop.
From that angle, I think returning to the status quo can be looked at a little more charitably.
I find the nature law arguement from Christiany useful here. Something is good when it is allowed to exist according to its proper nature, while evil is often understood as a kind of damage, sickness, or deviation from that form. If a cat loses one of its legs, the answer is to restore the missing leg, not to decide that four legs are boring and give the cat six tentacles instead.
A story usually starts because something has gone wrong. So fixing the problem often means restoring things to something resembling their proper condition.
So it qualifies as a proper terminal condition. And it's also believable.
A happy ending can easily feel like cheating. The dead don't rise. Sacrifices can't simply be undone. Many things in reality are impossible or irreversible. So such endings feel hollow.
But the status quo has happened. We have seen it. The glorious past. People look backward and reminisce about bygone days because the past is real and imaginable. It happened once. Maybe it can happen again. To be normal, to be healthy, to have your family, to go home again, even without being extraordinary, shouldn't that already be enough to be happy?
This is the default answer. 30 points out of 100. Passable. But sometimes you just wish for more.
Fiction can be seen as a kind of prosthesis, like an artificial eye or leg: we use it to replace a missing part of ourselves. A 30 point answer can fill in the absence, but it doesn't fits perfectly. It's a general answer, made for everyone, so gaps remain.
A movie might end, but if the ending does not satisfy the audience, then in some sense the act of viewing does not stop. The audience starts looking for that satisfying answer somewhere else: another movie, another book, another game, another version of essentially the same kind of story.
There are not really a hundred completely different movies. Sometimes it feels as if there has only ever been one movie: the one you haven't reached the ending yet.
And that's roughly how I think about the psychology behind this.
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