Thank you, I missed this! 😍
Okay, so I am actually enjoying that the author is playing a bit with the tropes and not putting them in their default forms like most other stories of this type. Like Caidel not being like "Oh, you made a deal with a literal devil? Welp, I like you so it's fine!". And he is also not like "I hate you right now, sorry", because as he said things are complicated and you can't just sort through the feelings instantly.
This is called character depth and nuance to how they act and I like it quite a bit. They will probably be able to work it out, but this is an obstacle to their relationship that for once it's not the big bad villain like usual, but themselves instead.
But hey I totally get why many of the usual readers of the genre and unnerved that the characters aren't the predictable single-minded-until-the-end-no-matter-what ones ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh and Ellen is totally fine, if she would be able to die from just that then she would have probably done it a long time ago.