Then you never feigned death long enough. I assure you, this character has been my main since early vanilla, and you could definitely die from FD’ing too long.
It was a thing until Burning Crusade dropped.
As to your request for an exception to permadeath, the current support article says “no”.
And asking here will not change that.
There’s a thread in the Classic Hardcore forums asking to change this; if you want to see this changed, you need to post there or someplace else besides Support.