Sadly I have to agree. They aren't biome graduation exams, they're progression roadblocks that drop some doohickey you need to advance. Now if you only had to kill them in order to gain their forsaken power it'd be a bit better, you could wait until you didn't have to choose between bland boring cheese and chain deaths. Unfortunately the 'git gud' crowd seem to enjoy that kind of combat so we're likely stuck with it as is.

Only alternative is console devcommands Kill or whatever the debug/cheat code is. I am extremely tempted to find out.