I'd have to re-read, as I may have missed a detail, but surely DAbnett could eat his cake and have it too here:
-- This episode never comes out and says "everyone died in that battle", only that they all died (again, I'd have to re-read to be certain) and that Lawson now keeps watch over them.
-- Assume Munce won, but that the Zhind intervention stopped them butchering everyone in town. Between that battle, the subsequent years and the Zhind/human war flaring up again everyone but Lawson could have died, but that would be a huge span of time and not quite the "oh, everyone died then and I've been here alone since" that you're being lead to believe in this episode.
-- So, Dan gets to show us the tragic, lonely, fitting end of Lawson's life watching over her town, but still bounce back to show us that the town - and some of the key characters - survived the battle with Munce and the town lived on, for a while at least.
That said, it would be entirely in keeping with his work on other strips (and other fiction, like Gaunt's Ghosts etc.) to have what appears to have happened be exactly what did happen, and for Lawson to have lived on alone watching over her dead friends for decades.
It is interesting that both Kingdom and Lawless seem to have come/be coming to, if not an end, then at least a firm pause. With Brink coming to some kind of a climax, it makes me wonder if Dan is preparing to take a break from the prog/Meg for a bit. He's working on the next Gaunt book, knee-deep in the final stages of the Horus Heresy series, has the next Eisenhorn/Bequin book on the go, and all of the other work he has running. Perhaps he's just setting things carefully aside in a way that won't leave too many dangling storylines in case it's a year or two before he can pick back up with other commitments?
