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I, along with probably the vast majority of readers, dislike / outright hate downer endings. I hate writers killing off characters I care about just "because the emotional conclusion needs main character to suffer loss" and other such bullshit (see eg. Harry Potter). That's just lazy and sloppy and feels like the writer pulling out the rug from under the reader in an intentional "hah, hah, fooled you, idiot!"-middle finger gesture instead of proper plotting and writing.
What I have no problem with and even like is the A Song of Ice and Fire type thing where it's made clear that this is the type of book where People Die (or even Anyone Can Die). The book sets proper expectations and then the "will they survive or not?" question becomes a part of the enjoyment when reading.
In addition to what @roystgnr says, I feel like Rowling suffered from a syndrome many authors do, which is that she ended up loving her characters and as such didn't want to kill as many of them as would have made sense. Who really died in the final battle, that we actually care about? One half of an identical duo, Lupin, and Tonks. That's not that much, and many more would have been warranted if the Death Eaters were actually a real threat.
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Harry Potter as an example is kind of strange. Harry's parents being dead is intro backstory. Mid-book 1 you find out that Wizard Hitler murdered them. Book 1 climax, you learn WH is coming back. Clearly there's some deadly shit about to go down.
Yet it takes until Book 4 before we get a major character death, and Book 6 before we get one that Harry and the readers really care about! The Watsonian explanation (Dr., not Emma) appears to be that Wizard Hitler is just even more outnumbered and incompetent (excepting the wizardry) than Regular Hitler was, and needs to lay low a lot, but the Doylist explanation is clearly that Rowling knew she was writing for kids and needed to pull her punches a bit.
Yes, that's my point. It gets established for almost five books that no one the readers truly care about is harmed, then Sirius gets offed at the end of book 5 and in the final battle of the entire series in book 7 more people get offed with no preparation and with nothing left of the book for their deaths to even influence. Those deaths just feel like a poor writer going "the tropes say I should kill some characters, so I'll just off them right like that".
In contrast Dumbledore's death is long foreshadowed and provides good progression for the story and thus feels like natural instead of being an ass-pull just to piss of the reader.
So it's not that character deaths or loss for the main characters are bad as such but many times they're poorly done and just make the reader feel bad.
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