Zack Snyder offers further reasons why DC heroes under his care would kill, starting with Superman in Man of Steel and onto Batman.
boundingintocomics.com
At this point, he's just fucking with people... but this is one thing I fully believe people just went full retard on for absolutely no reason.
I have seen some of the most asinine defenses of why Superman didn't need to kill Zod at the end of Man of Steel including:
"Superman could have used his Super Breath or lobotomized Zod"(Remember when the latter was explicitly see as a sign of Superman becoming no different than his Justice Lord counterpart against Doomsday? And he never showed Super Breath that can freeze someone, let alone a Kryptonian in the movie)
"Snyder shouldn't have destroyed the Phantom Zone Projector" The hilarious part is that it was only destroyed because Faora forced their hand
Which would realistically make sense for a race of beings that want to kill all humans to rebuild Krypton
"Superman could have talked Zod down" Are we just forgetting the fact the dude was born, bred and raised to be a General of Krypton? That was the entire spiel of why that motherfucker was losing his shit when Superman basically not only destroyed the only thing that could decipher the Codex(Thus forever dooming Krypton to save Earth) but got rid of every other Kryptonian.
Like it's ridiculous people bitched about this as Superman's "Code of Killing" is even more lax than most think, it's just something he doesn't do because he doesn't want to be a Judge, Jury and Executioner... that does not stop him from killing when there is NO OTHER RECOURSE(Which was the whole point of the scene before he snapped Zod's neck and his scream afterwards... he fucking HATED that he killed the last ties to his people, the fact he had to basically destroy any hope of others like him to stick around in the first place...)
Man of Steel ain't perfect but holy shit, I legit do despise the Comics Fandom that don't know shit, only parrots stuff like Superman vs. The Elite(Which misses the whole fucking point that while it does state why Superman shouldn't kill nillywilly, it also shows the CONSEQUENCES and overall issues on why people would want that) and give you the most surface level takes... but Snyder himself isn't immune to this either by basically acting like a child because by all accounts:
Man of Steel is the most regarded film of the DCEU despite how much Internet Culture wants to brainwash otherwise. The real flaws of the DCEU is primarily how dumb some of his ideas could be... but primarily more that Warner Brothers went full retard in trying to overcorrect on people's issues on MoS and rushing Justice League to the finish line with no chance to bake. Just gonna make me laugh harder with dumbasses who believe James Gunn is gonna save it when it looks like he's gonna do an even worse job than Snyder did.