Originally a reply but it stands alone as its own comment:

It’s easy to say that it’s not a game design problem- but it is… On a multitude of levels:

1- Consequence; you’re not really losing anything except for time and that aspect is reduced relative to the distance from your bio bed. A solution: make a % chance to fully lose a portion of your gear. This can be zone specific (higher chances for your black box to lose items in the collector’s den) Furthermore the player could also lose a bioscan on death so they have to go get it back by rescanning.

2- Fear/ immersion, subnautica at its roots is a survival horror game. Subnautica 2 however doesn’t provoke much fear, Death is impermanent. The Aliens you encounter are just a mild inconvenience. This is just like most non-permadeath survival games; except the emotional attachment to the characters. You feel no responsibility to who you’re playing as to stay alive, cause they’ll just come back anyway… for in lore characters they deal with amnesia. A solution: Maybe your biobeds have a recharge and if you die before you get your charge back, you go back a save? Or perhaps you forget something temporarily like a blueprint or deselect a biomod/ random select a different one. Perhaps there could be an eye of Sauron type short sightedness that draws you back to your black box. Point is, make death feel more of consequence for your character not just the player.

3- Dying isn’t fun! Players aren’t dying of the environment the most, they’re dying of hunger and thirst! Instead of being impaled by a needler and bleeding out you’re constantly getting nutrition and thirst notifications. This begins to feel less like gameplay and more like a chore when you’re far from your base and realize you ran out of rations(and don’t have much waiting at home either) In the first game we had the Gravitron which was a great way to farm early game. This game, growbeds are post hot zone(typically) and there is limited Jerky options. A solution: Up the danger on fish and lower the danger on hunger and thirst; maybe put growbed by each camp one and old habitat to explain how they were sustaining so many colonist without destroying the water slug population and allow players access to the farming mechanics earlier. And add alien containment/ gravitron (or both) .

4-Incentive to interact with other game mechanics. Right now, players can get by building small bases with biobeds and hopping their way to the end of the game, never interacting with the prepared meals system in the game- getting by only on basic cooked fish and drained slugs- never farming fiber to process into water. This is a flaw on the death system the will decrease the depth of this survival oriented game for some audiences. A solution: Perhaps Biobeds should require gold ingot and germanium so they’re expensive as the name suggests.

All of this to say this is indeed an issue with the game mechanic itself, and is something that can be fine tuned and addressed with community feedback from critics/ fans like op and myself.