Fortunately I don't mind too much. I would have minded more if I felt that I had caused my own death by a foreseeably bad decision. But this sequence of events and dice rolls wasn't really foreseeable, and thus I can see it as something close to a random event which gives me the opportunity to try out a different character class. I rolled a dwarven peace cleric with a "hippie" attitude: "Peace, man!".

For my next campaign as a DM, I want to try a completely different approach to character death. The Curse of Strahd campaign is gothic horror, not heroic fantasy. And it is open world, not linear, which gives rise to the opportunity of players walking into a fight they aren't strong enough for. I watched Chris Perkins as a DM in Dice, Camera, Action first turning three night hags into green hags to make them easier, and then changing other aspects of the adventure as written to make the fight even less deadly. And while I can understand this approach, I didn't really like it for my campaign.

The problem with permanent character death, especially the dreaded TPK, total party kill, is that it not only gives a message to the players that they were maybe too confident, but also tends to mess up the whole campaign for the DM. With a single character death you get the already not very believable "just after one of the group died, the group stumbles upon a lonely adventurer in the dungeon, who wants to join them". If the whole group dies, then continuing the same campaign at the same point with a new group is even harder to explain. Also, any character death negates any work you as the DM put into integrating a characters backstory into the campaign story.

So in my Curse of Strahd campaign, my characters will be unable to die. In other words, I am using a different set of house rules for the penalties of dying in D&D, the Dark Gifts rules from the D&D Adventurers League. If the party walks into a TPK, the monsters who killed them dispose of the bodies, and the next morning the "dead" player characters wake up, after "dreaming" of an encounter with the dark powers of Barovia. But they have come back with a dark gift, some modification to their bodies that turns them partially into a monster, with some advantages and disadvantages from the change. It should still make it so that the players get the message that they failed that encounter. But for the DM the advantage is that character death or a TPK is a way of "failing forward" the campaign story. The players probably want revenge on whatever killed them, but probably also want to avoid a repeat death, and thus will approach those enemies more carefully the next time. Or first do something else, and come back later, when they are stronger. The dark gifts and the realization that even death doesn't free their souls from Barovia should enforce the horror atmosphere of the campaign. I wouldn't use this approach for every campaign, but I think for this one it is appropriate.