Sure, but traditionally in many parts of the industry projects have a limited lifetime and the release is generally the end (i.e. death) of the project. This is

Sure, but traditionally in many parts of the industry projects have a limited lifetime and the release is generally the end (i.e. death) of the project. This is especially true in the games industry where until MMOs, DLC and perpetual "early access" came along most projects wouldn't outlive the release date except maybe for a very short support phase. So it's less about language evolution than about different connotations of the word "death". The end of a project is its natural death, the failure of a project is a premature death. Using the term postmortem for an end-of-life retrospective may seem morbid, but it's no more inaccurate than using it for an incident debrief -- because if you want to be that pedantic, a failure that doesn't result in the end of a project is not a "death" either.