I don't agree that character death is what inherently makes things meaningful.

I mean, if we're talking AD&D, I was in an AD&D campaign where one of the players lost their character literally before they had a chance to do anything - rolled it up, joined our group, we had a random wilderness encounter, an enemy that won initiative one-shotted them.

I'd say that living with the consequences of your decisions has a lot more potential to support meaning. That can mean you the player living with the consequence of not being able to play a character you liked, sure. But it can also mean, e.g., spending the next 6 sessions in a regency romance politics arc rather than fighting a dinosaur army. Or a wilderness arc where there will be no shopping for anything for the next 3 months of real time - a choice whose consequences will transcend character death since it'd be as true for a newly introduced replacement character as your veterans.

The Wand of Grease vs Wand of Magic Missiles thing is like that. What makes it meaningful is that you're going to spend the next several months of the campaign viewing encounters from the point of view of 'can I solve this with Grease?' versus the point of view of 'can I solve this with Magic Missile?', at least a little bit. If you like the feeling of trying to figure out weird ways to use Grease to resolve things, versus the more direct 'add damage to things until they die' of Magic Missile, then it's going to matter a lot to you that you committed to one path versus the other.

And it could be a visible choice if and when you go back and tell the story of that campaign. That storytelling isn't just going to be 'we won', its going to be the bits you personally thought were cool or surprising or revelatory or funny. 'Remember that time we Greased the ropes on a pirate ship and half of their boarders fell into the water before they could get to our ship?'. The specifics of what people find meaningful will vary from person to person, sure. But there is still a commonality that if each person went back and told the story of what they remember of the campaign, the meaningful choices were the ones that let that person recognize their own place in that story - the stuff where the story would have been different (in the way the person cares about) if it had been some other player playing through it.