It's moved over the years from the meat grinders of the early editions to the much more character focused ones now, but some things haven't really kept up.
The big one being character death becoming trivial midway through, and the combat kinda being centered around that. Death doesn't mean much when you just keep reviving them, and it's left up to the DM to figure out how to balance that (since the 5e economy is a mess).
5e long ago should've adopted a downed/injured system like much of the competition, with death being much more rare. Then again there's about 100 other things they should've done, and it's pretty clear they won't, so meh. Guess it just sits on the DM's
If a player really wants their character, I'd offer them the chance to do a spin-off campaign where they're in an afterlife, but if someone dies, that's it.
I care about what happens to Alfonso Derecho Izquierda Quijano, the Kobold Paladin who's in love with a dragon. I want him to have an arc, I want him to grow as a person, and eventually I want his story to end - either in death on the battlefield, or having achieved his dream of wedding a dragon, or coming to the realization that he wasn't chosen by a dragon but that it simply coughed up some armor from a guy it had eaten while flying overhead.
Having said that, I also want to play some games where characters are disposable, including Paranoia. That's fun too!