I may be the exception here, but I personally lean towards minimal PC death. Not necessarily that it should be impossible, but just rare and meaningful. I prefer a campaign where characters become immersed into some ongoing plot and, in fact, where the character's personality and how they change over time and achieve or fail to achieve their goals causes that character and their relationship to the world to change. A PC dying substantially hinders that and while the new character may have both some interesting backstory and some well reasoned justification for joining the party, it still undermines the continuation of that shared plot.
Not a lone exception; this is pretty much how I approach it too.
It's all about creating tension and excitement, both in old-school and story-focused gaming; the Eight Deadly Words ("I don't care any more what happens next" or "I don't care what happens to these people") kill games as much as they do books or movies. It's just a question of where you set the stakes.
I loved
A Song of Ice and Fire, both the book series and as
Game of Thrones on HBO, but I have to admit, after a certain set of events where good people died and lost, I became emotionally detached and it was never quite the same for me after that. I think something similar can happen in table top role playing, and can even get worse as lethality increases.
Long ago, when I was relatively new to gaming, I got involved in a D&D campaign in the back of a gaming store. Guy time running it was an old timer even then and still ran 1st edition AD&D. He ran us through dungeons, full of traps that continually reset, where we constantly encountered rectangular rooms with seemingly random monsters. In one room there would be a young dragon, who knows how it fit through the door or what it ate, and in a room across the hall was a vampire. A bit further down the hall way was a room with gnolls in it. How did these creatures live in this dungeon and coexist dozens of feet from each other, constantly having to face these traps that always reset themselves every day? Who knew. Why were we in the dungeon to start with? Who knew, we created a character with random die rolls and shazam, we're there in the dungeon with the rest of the party going from room to room checking for traps and preparing to fight. There was almost always at least one death every gaming session. When you died, your next character would just appear and seamlessly join the party, always at level 1 regardless of what level the rest of the party was at. Experience for monsters was only rewarded to the person who dealt the killing blow, or what ever the person dealing that blow wanted to share with those who helped.
As you might see, this setup was not at all conducive to creating attachment to either your character or any sort of overarching plot or narrative. Most people didn't feel any sadder over their character's failures or death than they would express sadness over their horseman who went bankrupt from staying in a Boardwalk hotel in Monopoly. Well, people wouldn't feel personal sadness over character death, but it could be very frustrating because a dead character meant not only that you would fall behind the surviving members of the party from starting back at level one, but that you would be much more likely to die in the future and less likely to gain experience.
This is probably an extreme example, I do acknowledge that, but it left a lasting impression on me of how both common death and harsh punishment for death can have a negative impact on the essence of what a role playing game is. At some point, it can become more of a war game or board game.
So now the group I play with, which is the same private group I have played with for 15 years or so, has a policy of very rare death. Death is rare, but defeat does happen from time to time and can be very emotional. Our party members have been captured and held for prolonged periods by enemies, have been permanently maimed, experienced terrible pain or terror, been emotionally scarred, lost all of our possessions including magical ones, seen close allies (NPC's) die, saw villains victorious as they rampaged through innocent populations, experienced our character's emotional turmoil as they failed at their lifelong goals or in some cases had to reexamine their deeply held convictions. No actual PC deaths involved in any of the above cases, but they were all much more emotionally significant than a character dying that you had only rolled up that night and where you had a backup sheet on standby. When you've had a character go through those things, including successes too, over the course of a year of play then all of their victories and defeats are going to matter to you more, because they are like a beloved fictional character in any good story, you're connected to them not just as a matter of how much damage they do each round, but as a person whose feelings are important too.