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Regarding creatures dying in the boneyards. I'd decided ahead of time that, if any of my PCs died while there, their obols would protect them. I was going to have them be resurrected in the same place they woke up the first time: in a sarcophagus in Roslar's tomb. Of course, they'd then face the difficulty of being alone and trying to find the rest of the party. I was thinking of giving them a permanent negative level as punishment though - the same as they'd incur after a Raise Dead spell.
It wasn't needed though, no-one died. In fact, my party was death free until they descended into Gallowspire in book 4.
I like this idea Cthulhu! A character "dying" in the Boneyard, only for, say, a bright light to emanate from their chest and their body to fade away as the light is drawn back down the path they've travelled, leaving the rest of the party confused and the character awaking in the dark alone? FAR more interesting than "hey bud, sorry your character died so early on before you could even really explore them, time to write a new one and we'll clumsily work you back into the plot."
On the question of "How do souls die in the Boneyard?", in Planar Adventures it has a section called River of Souls (p.64) about souls and petitioners that's kinda helpful!
For a typical petitioner, no matter how long it survives, it cannot last forever. Some petitioners are destroyed, whether by planar forces or violent natives. Being formed of living quintessence aligned with the plane it now calls home, a petitioner’s body and soul form a single unit. Should a petitioner be destroyed, no soul is released, and it gradually deteriorates into quintessence, which is absorbed by the surrounding plane.
This is about souls who have been judged and become petitioners on their plane of chosen afterlife. So not quite souls, but it does talk about quintessence deterioration and how their body is absorbed into the plane.
These souls are not transformed into petitioners; instead they are escorted into where they can forget and be forgotten. There, these lost souls wander until they find crypts and crevices where they can eternally brood on the failings of reality. Either willingly or because they lack the capacity to care, these dissenting and broken souls then spend eons gradually dissipating, forever excluded from future travel along the River of Souls. Eventually their memories fade, their personalities dull, and nothing remains but a handful of eternally stagnant quintessence. The spire the Purgatory perches upon is entirely composed of this soul debris, and is threaded through by vast crypts and catacombs.
This is about souls that don't become petitioners and what happens to them over time - not quite about being killed, but again we see this quintessence deterioration and "soul debris". I think the takeaway is that when a soul dies, its quintessence (the stuff its made up of) becomes part of the plane, sort of like a body decays and eventually becomes part of the earth (in a really simplified way).
(Hi I really love the metaphysics of Pathfinder I could talk about this all day <3)
((Oh, bonus fact! As the quintessence of the planes themselves decay its drawn through essentially another River of Souls: Planes Edition called the Antipode and transported back to the Positive Energy Plane, where some of it forms new souls that are then sent to the Material Plane and the cycle continues!))