There isn't really that much you need to know about avoiding death in this game. You mainly really only need some basic survival instincts, like eating food so you don't starve to death, not jumping off cliffs, establishing what things are dangerous so you know to avoid them, etc. There is zero punishment for death other than being sent back to your last save, so you can spend as much time as you want learning what is or isn't dangerous and subsequently how to deal with it.
Though, I will not lie that some deaths can absolutely be BS. Physics sometimes randomly bugs out and kills you, and some pretty bad luck can cast upon you insane dangers when you aren't prepared for them in the slightest.
You got a combination of 2 things:
On the 24th of any month IRL, a guaranteed event will happen where the sun will become censored and begin killing you. There isn't any way to deal with it directly other than just waiting the day out, so you simply just chose a bad day to start playing.
From your description of it, it sounds like you then encountered the Insomniac: a hallucinatory manifestation of your lack of sleep. It appears when you are below 20 stamina, and can be banished simply by going above that threshold by any means. It is normally pretty harmless when it catches you past the initial scare, but it sounds like physics bugged out and killed you when it caught you.