Pick a target background, race, and class, and race, spend a few seconds rolling or assigning stats, pick a handful of options from your race, class, and background, and maybe buy a little custom gear (though the default for class and background often has you covered).
5e chargen is usually lightning fast, even with a non-first-level start, unless you are creating your character by doing something like original optimized level 20 theorycraft. Which is probably a waste of time, even if you are dedicated to min/maxing, because someone's probably done the theorycraft you want online and you can just look it up.
The DM my group plays with has no issue killing off PCs, we're level 4 and have had 3 deaths across our party of 4 so far. (Two for the same player!).
IMO 5e isn't engaging in the right ways -- characters, and combat, become the primary context everything revolves around, and the dungeon itself falls to the wayside. Both because it's fairly easy, and encourages the DM to not kill you (even subtly, like the absurdly time-consuming character generation), so there's little reason to see the dungeon itself as a threat, and a tool. Skills get so minutely defined that even if you have a novel strategy, your character background strongly defines whether you can execute it (to the point that it's much easier to fall into standard patterns, and the dungeon is so nonthreatening that you can continue to do so indefinitely).
There's simply too little freedom and leeway in how you approach things, defining so many rules and contexts its not worth the trouble to continuously do novel things, but at the same time so expansive that it takes ages to get anything done. And the rules largely slow down the most uninteresting parts of the game -- standard combat, basic activities (leaping caverns and such), standard communication with NPCs, etc.
I mean its slow. The ruleset is fundamentally and ridiculously slow.