1) death trigger was originally quickly implemented as a test on whether position.y was lower than some constant (like, -10). However in one of the scenes the level was moved around a bit and was entirely below that constant, so... yeah, we had to change that quickly ^^
2) again with death triggers, I didn't have the time/didn't want to look how to restart/re create the player object/relink it to the camera and so on, so death is actually just a Teleport of the player to the last checkpoint. This can be seen whenever there are moving platforms around, as they don't reset.
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/459177
Also not a hack per se, but since this was our first time using unity (we only had a few hours of xp with it watching a couple of online tutorials) we lost quite some time with functions that where not performing as advertised in the documentation, becouse those functions where meant for 3D games and we had to use the 2D variant... After loosing like 1.5 hours on one of those and 30 minutes to another, I put up a sign on the desk in big letters : "DOESN'T WORK ? TRY ADDING 2D AT THE END OF THE FUNCTION!"