It seems fairly obvious to me that a wooden sailing ship, even built by hand with old technology, would be far easier to construct than a moon rocket.
It's hard to compare costs across such a great gulf of time, but consider for example that the Spanish Armada consisted of 130 ships, and was fielded by a country of about 8 million people at the time. If a 16th-century ship cost as much as a moon rocket today, then that would be roughly like the USA building 5,000 moon rockets. Moon rockets probably cost about $1 billion or so (Saturn V was a bit under in current dollars, SLS will be quite a bit over) so that would be about $5 trillion. Less than a decade later, Spain was able to throw another 140 ships at the English, so it wasn't a one-off thing either. And that's ignoring naval or merchant ships that didn't participate in the Armada.
I'd wager the ships were much more expensive than the crew at the time. Human life was quite cheap until recently (and still is in many/most parts of the world). A couple hundred man-years of of skilled laborers versus a couple hundred random nobodies?
OK, I agree that the ships are relevantly cheaper than the moon rockets. On the other hand, there are many organizations -- and individual people -- who could easily afford to lose a billion dollars on a moon rocket today. It was common (in some sense) for a galleon-owning merchant to be completely ruined by his single ship failing to come back. So I don't see that the cost of launching rockets is so high as to prevent the activity.
It seems like all of the work to support the idea "20% mortality is too high" is being done by the observation "there is no pepper on the moon". It may be too high on a cost-benefit basis, but that's because the benefits are very low.
But if you think that the benefits are high, perhaps because an initial high-cost high-mortality phase is the prerequisite to a long-term and profitable low-mortality phase, or even a long-term and profitable high-mortality phase, it seems pretty easy to accept 20% mortality.
The benefits not being that big are a big part of it. Yes, if there was some hugely compelling reason to create a moon base then a 20% loss rate would be fine. But there isn't. There are no resources that would make it worthwhile, and I don't see the "national pride" argument supporting that kind of cost. That's what Apollo was built on, and that got canned after only six landings. And they had the USSR to compete with, so I'd think the "national pride" motivation was much stronger than it would be now.
