it’s lazy in a different way but sometimes you aren’t killing off that character’s parents for an easy tragic backstory. sometimes you kill off the parents just so you don’t have to write more characters.
sometimes it’s because a twelve year old with living parents would probably not be permitted to stay out all night in the junkyard with the gnomes
11 YO chosen one: “I need to travel across the country to complete this quest and save the universe because a wizard I met in an abandoned subway told me it was my destiny.”
Responsible parent: “The hell you are!” cocks shotgun “Where’s this ‘wizard’?”
sometimes it’s because your entire inspiration for the story was “what if people could end unwanted pregnancies without actually killing the embryo, just keep it frozen in case someone else wants it” and then you decided that the logical conclusion of this was “so many unwanted frozen embryos that the only solution is to put them on starships to colonize other planets” and so yeah your protagonists are growing up on on a spaceship being raised by robots and exiled convicts and of course their parents are dead of old age because of relativistic speeds, this was pretty much the life that began at this whole idea’s conception