Whatever ambiguity there is in terms for other sins like murder or rape, there is usually far more immediately accessible clarity in the concepts behind the words. Murder is not the accidental killing of a fellow human; it is the intentional killing of a person outside the contexts of self-defense or just capital punishment, and the Bible itself even clarifies that murder is not the same as the accidental tragedy of manslaughter (Exodus 21:12-14). Rape is not rough sex or even lesser forms of sexual assault; it is nonconsensual sex, no matter which gender is the perpetrator or victim and no matter how gentle or rough the sex is (Deuteronomy 22:25-27). The offense of working on the Sabbath is not this clearly understood from the isolated command to kill those who work on the Sabbath because there are legitimate Biblical or logically necessary exceptions to most broad concepts most people define "work" as. The word work could refer to the professional kind used to earn an income, the mental effort needed to merely reorganize thoughts or household objects, or the kind needed to save lives or overcome other spontaneous obstacles.
The specific Sabbath case laws given target physical labor (even having a day of rest to imitate Yahweh after creation was finished would be contradictory in goal if it did not allow for thinking, breathing, eating, drinking, and so on, with the latter two examples here being necessary for health or survival in some cases), yet Jesus acknowledges that it actually is morally permissible to perform physical tasks that heal the sick on the Sabbath even as he himself heals on this day [1], just as he points out how the priests of the temple were authorized by God to make offerings on the Sabbath (compare Matthew 12:9-14 with Numbers 28:9-10). Not all physical effort is described as sinful on this day. What, then, of making money if it does not involve physical labor but is not through totally passive forms of income creation? That hospital workers might be exerting great physical effort to save lives while working for money on the Sabbath would be an exception that meets the Biblical qualifications, yes, but what of jobs that involve merely speaking or writing, things that require minimal physical effort or that people might do on the Sabbath anyway for pleasure or communication? These, too, are not by necessity included in the kind of work the verse refers to or in the examples of condemned work that come up in Biblical stories.
Since God's core moral nature does not change whatsoever (Malachi 3:6), only a fool would think it is Biblically valid to think that the Sabbath law in Exodus and Leviticus would somehow cease to be obligatory, but only someone who has never read the relevant parts of the Bible or made a plethora of assumptions along the way would actually think that the Biblical doctrine is to kill people for healing, breathing, speaking, or many other similar activities on the Sabbath. Unecessary or specifically prohibited physical labor (there is the particular example of someone killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath after they would have been warned not to do such things beforehand) is in view here, and nothing else. When even the Bible itself clarifies that certain activities are not condemned with the Sabbath obligation, and some other forms of even professional work are identical to what families or friends might otherwise do on the Sabbath (like just talking with each other), it is clear that the Sabbath law, in the Bible's own descriptions, is not against all activity, just a certain kind of gratuitous activity.
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