I apologize in advance for the all-caps above, for whatever reason the website only accepts the following lower-case characters in search prompts and form fields: bcdeghjknopqrsuvwxz (Safari 18.1.1)

ANYWAY

https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/32344904160397-Minecraft-Bedrock-Edition-1-21-50-The-Garden-Awakens under the Gameplay section includes this:

• Players will keep their inventory after dying on Easy and Peaceful as we're testing ways to adapt our difficulty levels. Your feedback is greatly appreciated on this page

This turns out not to be the case on either single player worlds or on Realms.  I'm seeing this on iPads and Android devices.