On the other hand you also don't want to turn your crew into pancakes or even make your upper stage look like a squashed can. You have a couple options:
- throttle the engine
- design payload weight, propellant load and trajectory to make g loads bearable till burnout
And one more thing related to stage 2 burnout - precise orbit insertion. Rocket engines used to be pretty imprecise at shutdown, delivering a slightly lower/higher impulse at shutdown at random. Due to this many older rockets have also some small & precise engines to correct the orbit insertion once the main one shuts down - many Chinese rockets have that. As far as I know, the Falcon 9 upper stage engine (Merlin 1D Vacuum) is precise enough so this is not needed.