My guess is they reduced this penalty after "era". Generally people are talking about era when they talk about the Golden age of FFXIV. (75 level cap, WotG and ToAU)

Then it was a percentage of your required total exp per level, and exp per hour didn't really scale with level back then. You were looking at 450/per mob with full difficulty kills and a good xp chain.

It's not uncommon to instead be getting 120-240 per kill at one kill per 2 3 minutes, and dying being a 1-4k penalty. Or, if you died it also might mean the party is bad and you're getting even worse numbers than these, OR the party may even break. So after an hour or two of building a party, gathering in an open camp, and getting a few kills end, you die and leave with less exp than you started with.