It's time to keep this old thread alive!
I like what I've seen mentioned a few times here and on discord with slightly random spawn points, here's how I imagine it (of course it'd all be an option since not everyone would enjoy this perhaps):
-- Death puts you somewhere random, could be close or very far from your previous stuff. Probably would be a good idea to have a max distance from your set-spawn point or the last house visited/bed slept in or something idk, but it'd still be potentially pretty far away.
-- Your items don't despawn (maybe food rots but idk), but your mini-map is reset so you have no idea how far you are / where your old house is. You have to explore to find it!
-- Once you find your dead body/grave/whatever you get back all your items and old waypoints/mini-map exploration, you found your "old map"!
The reason I think this could be fun for some people is that it makes death scary as it is a setback, however it isn't a permanent one. If you like to explore a lot, you might even recognize where you spawned, making it much easier to find your way home! Also, I just like the idea of "restarting" temporarily with low-tier equipment while looking for your old base. It kinda puts the whole survival aspect back into play when your farms/armor/tools are out there somewhere, but you don't know how to get back (yet).
One potential problem with this however is spawning in bad locations (desert), but that's only a problem if there's no inherent way to survive in most biomes. Another problem is large servers would probably want this turned off/edited in some way, since it'd eat up all the flint/obsidian within a large radius of towns and make it harder to survive at low-tier for lack of resources.
The "dark souls" style respawning (no time-limit, but dying again makes your old grave/stuff despawn if you didn't get it back before then) is also a fun idea, if they were both optional some people could combine them and it'd make it pretty tense and fun to try to survive in a new location without dying. Just my 2 cents, could be a fun mod idea even if it's not in vanilla.