Exactly that. To make a sprite blink, all you've got to do is to set it to be not displayed and then displayed again. Usually by just writing a single register or pointer or setting a flag to skip drawing it. No additional sprites (for dying or whatsoever) needed and especially no complex (*1) animation code to be developed and added. All of that would have not only required additional effort, but code space and certain functionalities, both which may have been quite restricted on early systems (think Atari 2600).