If you never lose, you can’t win either.
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My main issue with the topic is this concept of “punishment”. You can have death be meaningful without its effects being a “punishment”.
For reference, I really burned out of PoE due to the XP penalty. What it did to me was push me progressively away from hard content, making me playing only easy content and making me progressively a worse player. As you go to ever easier content, XP rewards become ever slower, and a single death becomes progressively even worse. And since you don’t necessarily play hours every day, losing a few hours can mean losing days or even weeks of grinding.
Needless to say that my relationship with PoE became toxic and I am glad I quit this cursed game (never again).
That isn’t to say that there’s no benefit to some form of penalty when dying, as the ability to simply zerg through content can easily make it feel meaningless. Just that making it a punishment can easily lead to the game becoming toxic for a good chunk of the playerbase. The trick is how to make it meaningful without it becoming a punishment. Also, going for a heavily punishing game is already a niche filled by PoE.
I personally found a decent (though impractical) middle ground by playing Hardcore offline and simply backing up my saves regularly. If I die, I simply load my backup (including affix shard stash so that I don’t unduly keep loot). This way, death does have a significant consequence, but I don’t simply lose days of grinding because I blinked at the wrong moment. That’s also what I found worked for me for Diablo 2. It doesn’t work on online-only games, though. 
The only issue there is that it tends to be a little tedious.
Maybe they can find a reasonable middle-ground, but I would urge to be cautious about the concept of “punishing” players. Being meaningful doesn’t mean it has to feel like you’re being punished. Also, for extreme masochistic penalties, like losing massive amounts of XP with possible deleveling, I would strongly recommend looking into modding, as pushing it towards the major part of the community is just going to kill the community and thus the game.
Guess you have never played russian roulette.
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Mike said in an interview that “we are not a big fan of the negative progression that comes with loosing experience when you do die …”
Losing experience upon death, most annoying feature in any arpg, is not welcomed in any future game lol. This is a lazy mechanic to punish and add time spent for a player… same type of lazy mechanic that a boss with a 1 shot kill attack would be.
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