This has been an issue for ages. Sometimes when you die in a Greater Rift and you select to respawn at the last checkpoint, you’ll respawn at the entrance of the rift rather than at the entrance on the floor you died on.
And its f…ing pain, why it havent been fixed yet is beyond me !
I’ve seen this reported many times over the years. So, it’s rather ironic that I still haven’t checked this out in all the GRifts I’ve run.
But, I don’t think a Checkpoint is created each time you enter a subsequent GRift Level. And even though I don’t remember ever getting a Reached Checkpoint Toast Window on first entering a GRift, I think the game automatically considers the entrance of Level 1 as a Checkpoint.
The best thing to do would be to create a thread on the General Discussion Forum suggesting a Quality-of-Life change to have a Checkpoint created upon entering each Level of a GRift. I’m sure you would get a lot of support from other players.
Currently though, I doubt if Blizzard considers this an issue, which is why it’s never been “fixed”.