I thought the rare occasions in monkey island games where you could 'die' it basically rewound to an acceptable state before that? (IIRC the second one even made a joke out of this with a falling off a cliff and bouncing back up thing)

The drowning ending is more of an easter egg than something you're likely to find in normal play. There's only one item you can interact with, so even if you can't think of the solution, it's easy to brute force it before the 10 minute timer runs out.