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There are genres where such explicit violence may be expected, but I am inclined to think it may be getting more widespread, creeping into genres where it doesn't really belong. I think that in some cases the authors justify it as "shock value", something to grab the reader's attention ... but it's one of those things where a little goes a long way, and a writer needs ask themselves just how explicit it really needs to be. For shock value the first blow can be enough - more than enough, to keep dragging it out actually reduces the impact. As you suggest, there are also other, more subtle ways, to express violence.
I sometimes thought that it would be good if there was some sort of classification system like we see for movies. At the moment we generally only have the one "adult" classification, but it as far as I can tell this is mostly used for marking the more extreme end of the spectrum. It is not fine grained enough. I have my doubts how effective it could be, some people see more, or react more strongly to, violence (or whatever) in a scene than others.
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