This may have been an intentional removal, but I do not believe that it is one. Prior to the 13 April 2010 update, the death screen would continuously zoom in after death. This is no longer true, and the camera neither falls to the ground nor does the zoom continue for more than a few seconds.
The Infdev recording shows the intended function, while the 1.21.8 recording shows the bug.
Environment
Windows 10, RTX 4090, Intel i9, 32 GB RAM
For the 1.21.8 footage, I used the bundled JRE with the Minecraft launcher.
For the Infdev footage, I used Java 8.
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Comments 2
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We are tracking this issue in MC-298770, so this ticket is being resolved and linked as a duplicate.
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This is almost definitely caused by the player’s body being removed from the world after death.