There's a backlash to this called Old School Renaissance (or Revival, short: OSR) that tries to bring back high-mortality, "you play the world, not the characters" type of gaming to D&D. The character based and scripted story driven D&D was not always a thing. Some argue it started with second edition (which came 15 years later). Some good examples of such can be seen in the Judges Guild published material from 1975-1979 which focuses on procedural world generation and emergent storytelling rather than scripted characters with backstories and plotlines.