Yea, I have predicted that perma death will not work in MB. It was a bad idea.
Just allow death by ageing but disable combat deaths. It does not work with basics of the game. But I guess devs can't walk back that path anymore since they have committed too much in to this.
As for mods, problem here is that they deal with it mostly by just reducing the death in combat chance to zero. They don't address problems of the overall balance (birth to death ratios and so on). That can lead to some unwanted consequences.