I understand your frustration but action scenes don't have to be about sudden deaths. Action scenes have to be about actions — you performing things in a risky and exciting way. Action scenes can, but don't have to be, combat situations, but most adventure games that have action scenes have them contained within the regular game engine — the gameplay remains relatively the same, but you simply have to think a bit faster. In that sense, think of the original Broken Sword, which has quite a few such moments where you need to move to the right place or equip the right object in a (reasonable) time limit.
In a King's Quest game if someone randomly shows up and you die, that's not something I would call an action scene. It's merely a sudden death — there's no time for action.
About how there should never be action in an adventure game, that's a valid point, but think of how many games have successfully (and I use that term subjectively) utilized such scenes to bring up a tangible sense of danger! The Broken Sword series, the Gabriel Knight series, the Tex Murphy series, The Last Express (that one's a bit more controversial, as many hate the action scenes), the King's Quest series (it gets action right at least some of the time)... without their action scenes, they'd be a bit different.
No one's proposing a total turnaround of adventure game design, to revert things back to RPG and sudden deaths. That'd be a bit silly, and I also wouldn't approve of that. There's a lot of games I love that have no action in them at all, and I think it fits them very well. Games like The Longest Journey and most LucasArts titles have benefited from the more relaxed feeling they have, and in those cases, action scenes wouldn't work as well (although there is a fun bit at the end of Day of the Tentacle that is definitely an action sequence, with no penalty for failure). So the adventure genre is very likely to remain faithful to what is has been (Zork and other early adventure-ish games aside).
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