I'd make Vegeta a permanent death in the Freeza arc were not for the Cell arc. Kuririn too. It'd give a good closure to the Freeza arc, Kuririn and specially Vegeta being revived soon afterwards took a little of weight from their deaths. In this case, I imagine there just wouldn't have been any Kaio's plan, so they wouldn't use the DBs to send everyone to earth and thus revive Vegeta. So all of them would remain dead, Piccolo, Gohan and Bulma would escape to Earth with the spaceship Goku came in, Namek would explode and Goku would die. Having died twice, Goku would join Kuririn in the afterlife and live with him on Kaio's planet. Since Chaozu couldn't be revived either (no Namekian DBs), the four of them, Goku, Kuririn, Ten and Chaozu would live together in Kaio's planet. Yamcha would live with them and spend the remaining time with the original DB team before getting revived and leaving, marrying Bulma, after giving a good farewell to all his teammates. And then yeah, DBZ would come to an end. Vegeta would have his body eliminated and his soul cleaned of its past memories before being used for another being, basically disappearing completely.
So yeah, Tenshinhan and Chaozu's death from the Saiyans would be kept permanent too. That'd be a very good ending for DB imo, and Gohan and Piccolo would be the Earth's protectors along Yamcha as a side role were bad things to happen.
From OG DB I don't think anyone could be kept dead. Kuririn was a very important character for the development of the Saiyans and Freeza saga... And Roshi would be nice to be still alive, he gave that very good speech reminding Kami of his importance at the end of the 23rd Budokai, which gave all of the original DB sagas even more of a wholeful meaning.
With the existence of the Cell saga tho, they could not remain dead. Maybe Kuririn, Ten and Chaozu could, but Ten and Kuririn still played a role here and there. And there would be no Cell saga without Vegeta.
