I had a deathwave the first time. Since then, after reading some advices from this forum, I started to expand slower and paid more attention to traffic (with no despawn mod) and to the death/birthrate stats (I use City Statistics Easy Access and CSL Stats Panel). That helped and deathwaves became way more manageable, not a big problem anymore but still happened once in a while and still slightly annoying. A few buildings could get abandoned each time happened but not districts or the entire city.
Deathwaves in a sense are normal, because of the highs and lows in birthrate/deaths, but they shouldn’t be visible, at least not districts full of corpses while you have lots of inc/cem. What I really think is the key is that hearse AI is terrible. You only need to spend a few minutes following one during a DW, It may go from one end of the city to the other and again crossing the entire map to go to the incinerator/cemetery, like a tennis match, ignoring corpses in between and provoking a cascade effect with ease.
I use the hearse AI mod and haven’t seen any DW since, at least not one I could notice. Hearses work much more efficient now (by district, but can go out if needed and picking new corpses on the way), like night and day. So there is not really a bug, only a very primitive and simple AI for hearses which coupled with a big peak of deaths (from zoning) and not perfect traffic can result in a catastrophic effect , and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was working as intended for performance reasons, to avoid the cpu overhead of a better one.
