I agree with you on this. While survival games are fairly easy when implementing this, permadeath doesn’t go very well with RPGs. I can’t really give any good examples of non-survival permadeath as none of them would work with Roblox’s demographic.
The issue is that not only will the majority give up on your game after a death with a high progress, there is also the issue of Roblox being highly unreliable on the server side, so combat will be a big issue, unless you make it 100% client side. Making a game you want is nice, but it isn’t worth much if you can’t get retention.
You have no idea how many times I gave up on a Roblox game just because I got a 5 sec latency while an NPC comfortably munched on my body.