As long as it's not the "soulslike" way of dealing with it, I'm ok with any system, even the most punishing permadeath.

Every game has its own mechanics, and are meant to be played in a particular way. I try to adapt to the developer's concept.

In general, I prefer multiple saves anytime anywhere. It's up to the player how much he prefers to loose.Want to try something: save. Forgot to save, you'll learn next time

Was bad at Mortal Kombat (lost everytime against Goro), hatefull to have to beat all previous chacracters over and over just to get to Goro
For roguelikes I like if some new items / traits are introduced after death so the next run is easier / different.
Smash them up: infinite continues

I'm genuinely curious as to what makes soulslike so terrible for you, could you elaborate? As far as Dark Souls goes, it's not that different from how say Super Mario handled it. Heck, you even have infinite lives, so technically it's even more forgiving. If you die in SMB, you lose your power up, in Dark Souls you become hollow. Yeah, you have to pick up your dropped souls and humanity, but that's about it. In both you get thrown back to the previous checkpoint. Am I missing something?

In Diablo II gold never really mattered and was only used for gambling.

I don't like the idea of going to the same places and having to fight the same foes again just to regain your soul. I find it kinda grinding and boring... I know there are many games that use a variant of this system (Hollow Knight or Diablo, for example) and I didn't find it so annoying in those cases. Maybe it's because in Dark Souls dying is way easier than many other games, and repeating again and again ends up being quite tiring. Or just personal taste, I guess...

There's nothing wrong with good old game over screens.

Ok, fair enough.

Well, not unless that damn dog's laughing at you...

was not joking.

I like the Dark Souls system. It punishes failure without being overbearing (most of the time)
If you die, you go to the last save point (not exceptionally common, but not too spread out, either) and lose all your money/experience (they're one in the same in this case) that has not been spent on items/levelups. You now must get back to where you were before to retrieve it. If you die again, it is gone forever. If you get it back before dying, then you are good to go, unless you die again before you spend it down, in which case you have to go retrieve it again. I believe Diablo II had a similar system in which you'd drop items and money and have to run and retrieve them, which was bad because it was all your equipped gear. Great. I have to get back to what killed me without the stuff that was preventing me from dying in the first place!!

Not even if the game gives you a very clear warning, and gives you a large number of save slots?

Hollow Knight's death system is the one thing I really did not like about the game. It basically means that players who are having trouble are penalized, making it harder for them to recover.

In other words, if you are having trouble, the game makes it even worse, which can lead to a downward spiral.

And resurrecting companions I think? Or regaining gear or something? Remember that after hoarding as much as I could throughout the game, I just barely managed to finish off Bhaal at the end before running out of money, since basically in order to hit him I had to let him kill me, so it was couple of hits, die, go back, repeat, and think that was what I used the money for.
But anyway, Diablo 2's first problem is that areas reset whenever you load. And only saves when you quit anyway. So need to stop playing near the end of an area, tough luck, need to clear it all over again when you get back.
Then again, I call it the worst game I ever played, when comparing to the resources put in it and the hype and expectations, so...

In SMB, you can't lose more progress than you started a playing session with.

In a game like Hollow Knight, you can lose money that you had at the start of a playing session, and the game auto-saves when that happens.

If a game is going to do something like this, it should not auto-save, to allow the player the option of losing progress since the last save instead (like the way Dragon Quest handles it).

This sort of thing is precisely what I dislike about games like Hollow Knight (and Shovel Knight, though at least in SK the game doesn't actually save anything until you complete the level, and you can get your money back by exiting the level first).

I also dislike how many MMORPGs would cause the player to lose experience points on death or resurrection. (Do modern MMOs still do this?)

Well, that's your personal preference. I like having a challenge and player death to have meaning beyond the inconvenience of reloading the last save or starting the last puzzle over again. It's one of the things that makes Hollow Knight so GOOD, is having a penalty for dying. It drives you to be successful (IMO). Not trying to convince you, necessarily, just elaborating on why I like this system. If death has no real penalty, it just gets boring. I can't die, because in this game it never actually happened, or dying is trivial. DS is in between. You don't reload your last save (like in SotN or RotN, for example) where your last save could be several locations and hours back, and all that progress is just lost, doomed to need repeating. At least in DS, you can beat your head into a brick wall until you eventually batter it down. Lords of the Fallen and The Surge take a different path to it. If you die, you lose all your experience, and you have a time limit to go retrieve it. The longer you take, the lower % of your lost experience is left. On the other hand, it is a risk vs reward system. The more exp you have on you at a given time is boosted by higher multipliers for kills before you die. So it is beneficial to keep large amounts of XP unbanked because it will reward you with bigger bonuses. The key is finding the balance for your skill level that allows you to get the most power from kills while not having so much that it would be too painful to lose.

I'm with paladin on this one. If it's done well, I prefer games where you can't just save/load your mistakes away. Dark Souls and Hollow Knight do it brilliantly. It's obviously not for everyone, but it works for me.
I find difficult games that are balanced around infinite quicksaves far more frustrating than, say, DS. Lots of 90's shooters are just painful to play.

I would personally prefer a more adaptive approach to difficulty. If I die because I was stupid or sloppy I should get punished for it by the game because else what is the point of playing if not the challenge? But if I'm genuinely stuck and can't progress in the game for lack of skill or a difficulty spike whatever then I would love for the game to accomodate me and lower the difficulty or simply let me pass the current hurdle. God Hand kind of do this.

If there are no consequences for dying then you're gonna play sloppy and not take it serious but on the other hand I also like to progress in the game and while there must always be a chance that you can lose or fail the entire game I do wish devs would help the player more when the player is really stuck.

So I'm conflicted on this.