@MoiMagnus: humans demonstrably care about, even get addicted to, games of chance where they have less than 50% chance of victory. So your argument for why chance of death has been lowered in later editions of D&D is incomplete at best, and fallacious at worst. There isn't such a straightforward relationship between frequency of loss and how much a player cares about their participation in a game.

The actual reason chance of death has been lowered, is more likely that later developers (and players) idealize the concept of taking the same character through an entire campaign, and that is impossible if random death is too common. They may presume that players remain more invested this way but, again, the relationship is not so straightforward that this ought to be taken for granted.