Apparently pulping injuries are still recoverable. During a recent near-fatal tantrum spiral I had a couple of dwarfs have hands "explode into gore", and after they got stitched and splinted and spent a few months on Rest the injuries are back up to yellow and they no longer have "ability to grasp somewhat impaired". Which is nice, because one victim was one of two surviving miners and had also piled up quite a bit of Carpenter skill making caskets.
I think blunt trauma including pulping tends to be less permanent than edged trauma. Shattered bones and pulped flesh can heal where as severed nerves and tendons do not. Perhaps toady should add a high chance of destroyed tendons and nerves to body parts that suffer massive bone shattering blunt trauma.
It should be noted that pulping is a descriptor of the extent of blunt injury to a body part. It indicates the structural failure of that part but not its physical state. So when you read that something explodes into gore its kind of a generic descriptor rather than an exact indicator of the sort injury that was sustained. Exploded into gore essentially just means the body part has taken enough blunt trauma to lose is structural function but it doesn't actually tell you the sort of injuries sustained. You have to look at the body part yourself to figure that out. For instance a hand that has "exploded into gore" would likely have a bunch of severe fractures and split open flesh. The hand no longer works as a hand at least temporarily due to the severity of its injuries but it hasn't literally exploded into little pieces so it can heal. I think where pulping becomes fatal is when internal organs become involved. I don't think I have seen anything survive a pulped torso or head for instance.
Pulping is a new mechanic so it is to be expected that its a bit clunky at the moment. The reason a pulped throat probably doesn't kill is the throat is not considered to contain vital organs and blunt damage won't sever arteries. In other words a pulped throat despite having absolutely massive blunt trauma will still have the arteries intact so bleeding out doesn't happen.