It's the execution too. Unless you were around and a fan in 1982, you knew about Spock's death after the fact. I wasn't even three yet when TWOK came out. So that tells you all you need to know right there. TVH was the first Star Trek movie I saw as a fan. So I watched TWOK, later on, knowing full well Spock would come back to life. It still didn't take the punch out of the scene. To this day it still carries a lot of weight. Even more so on a different level, now that Leonard Nimoy has passed away.
My impression of the Kelvin Films was that, by that point, Kirk and Spock barely even liked each other. If it had been done before but Into Darkness dramatically improved upon how it was done before, that would've been fine. But, as it was, all I could do was keep mentally comparing it to the scene in TWOK and the comparison wasn't favorable.