If you were the GM, how would you respond to a group's attitude that if their characters die, you should just re-play the encounter or move on anyway - because it's too much work to make a new character and losing an evening's worth of game progress is "punishment enough?"
Like, I'm flabbergasted here. Maybe these people shouldn't be playing RPGs - or at least mainstream games like D&D or Pathfinder?
This isn't "BADWRONGFUN", even if it doesn't match my play style.
Character creation is a combination of the mechanical elements, the personality and related details, and possibly backstory/hooks for character arcs. It can get heavy depending on the system and how much effort the player puts into the non-mechanical parts. You mention PF, that is a system where you need to plan ahead of time and working out a build is a large investment of time just on the mechanical part. If they carry that practice over to D&D (or play 3.x which is what spawned it), then that part can appear to be daunting as well.
It feels like the DM has been training them that every fight is winnable, so that when a death comes they feel it's an aberration. This is on the GM (and previous ones) setting expectations. If there are no down beats based on character actions, and character actions always lead to progress regardless of the road they take to overcome challenges, that's on the GM.
It also seems like a unhealthy conflation of character goals = player goals that is common in the very games you mention, D&D and Pathfinder, where players feel they are being punished if they aren't making progress.
I am loathe to invoke the tired "video games are killing RPGs" trope but this is how they have experienced those types of games and set expectations as well.
And while this is being overtly discussed as "too much work to make a character", there are likely also "I like this character and don't want to lose them" for a multitude of reasons.
I can see this style, and a chunk of it is expectations the players have from both outside sources but also from their DM.