Pre-death, deciding to divert from a potentially dangerous activity because of the credit loss is bad too - the game should push players to take risks that result in fun and exciting adventures/moments for them
This, I think, is the key point. Elite gives players full choice over what they do next, so they can always choose to pick activities with guaranteed success (for whatever combination of ship and skill they have, above a very low floor).
Given that the player can guarantee success, any consequence for failure beyond "you don't get any reward for that activity" strongly incentivises never taking any risks (and player advice tends in that direction too) - the guaranteed success option can very easily end up with a higher expected payout even without loss aversion.
In that context, things which can cause
unexpected failure have received numerous complaints from the player base - the Scythes showing up outside direct Thargoid territory, or the ambushes in what looked like a "safe" signal source, etc. - and have been toned down or removed fairly quickly. Which, again, rational in the moment from the players, probably not good for the game overall.
There's some BGS considerations - being able to stack up a ton of exploration data and turning it in over a longer period of time would discourage you from doing other, riskier activities until you've handed in the data. Is that in any way good? If exploration data loss would be removed would it be best to force players to hand in all their data at once or not at all?
There's an odd asymmetry between the various BGS pools as it is:
- trade cannot be significantly deferred
- bounties/bonds can be deferred indefinitely, and even handed in to a different system, though all deferred bounties have to be cashed at once [1]
- exploration data can be deferred indefinitely and cashed in gradually and/or across multiple systems
- missions cannot be significantly deferred
- murder cannot be deferred at all [1]
- exobiology has no BGS impact of any sort at all.
So changing how one of them works shouldn't really matter too much - it'll change tactics for the highly optimised groups (they'll adapt) but shouldn't have much effect on normal BGS fluctuations or equilibrium system influence levels.
I suspect the original reason that bounties and bonds and exploration data are vouchers rather than the instant payout almost every other game uses, is that the DDF-stage designs mentioned being able to trade them between players. That was never implemented - and indeed it's hard to see why it would be useful, with the rest of the game as it is - but may be why it works as it does.
Changing to have them just credit your account instantly would do the following:
- bounties and bonds couldn't be moved between systems (or in wars, between days): affects BGS strategy [2], would stop people stockpiling for CGs (or doing the activity in a completely different system with "better" hunting)
- the cost of death in exploration would be reduced to "you're now back at your previous station" which is still potentially pretty big, and exploration would disappear as a BGS effect entirely (which might cancel out [2] somewhat)
[1] There's also an asymmetry here between the Political BGS and the Thargoid War. In the Political BGS, an enemy kill gives you a deferrable and losable voucher, which does nothing until handed in. In the Thargoid War, the enemy kill is the thing which has the effect on the system state, and the voucher (which you can't lose) does nothing other than convert to money later.
[2] Unfortunately in a way which strengthens the position of non-Anarchy system controllers even further, which is probably undesirable from the "dynamic galaxy" perspective.
We already have data caches in space, just pretend it's someone else's data - there's your nominal fee. 
