The answer is: No.
We've been trained by decades of "How it's been" to believe that character death is a needed and important risk in the game. We're locked into a form of Stockholm Syndrome with the idea of death... in the same way that we think that we're okay with Death in life. Or pain. Or having to go to work, each day. Or any other dreary, sad, or painful aspect of our lives. We lie to ourselves, and others, about how important it is to deal with these things. How it's a matter of growth or closure or how bad things somehow give good things meaning.
But if we could actually live in a world where our loved ones -didn't- die? Where our first dogs were still with us, bouncy and young and healthy 50 years later? Where automation was strong enough that practically no one had to work and everyone spent most of their time playing and enjoying their lives? We'd sign up in a heartbeat. People write whole religions about a place where this kind of thing is the baseline for their afterlife.
It's largely platitudes because we feel like we have no choice and so romanticize our interactions with the bad things.
I've run games for those "Death must be a risk" kind of players before in which I flatly made sure no encounter would end in their deaths. Capture, humiliation, etc. I didn't -tell- them Death wasn't a risk, but it never was.
They still had a blast. Especially when they had to escape a prison cell or rescue a friend who was captured or something else. The fact that death wasn't a real risk was never mentioned. No one complained that nothing was trying to rip them apart. They just enjoyed the game.
Consequences, both good and bad, are important for the story. But death?
Save it for specific moments. Make -choosing- death into something a player actively does as the only way to die... and don't tell your players that.
They'll love the game just as much, if not more, than ones where some random goblin can get a lucky crit and end the prophesied one before their quest really starts.
