iphone suddenly died

Most likely the battery ran down. See if this recovers it→If your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch won't turn on or has frozen – Apple Support

If that restores it to operation post back and there’s additional troubleshooting to do to try to determine the cause. If that doesn’t work it’s most likely a hardware problem.

The link I provided will not erase any information on the phone. But if it doesn’t work most likely the contents of the phone are gone.

Is there a reason you don’t enable real-time sync of photos and videos to iCloud, or at least set up automatic nightly backups?

Are you sure you didn’t do ANY of these ways of preserving photos and videos?

• emailed, texted or messaged the photos to friends or family
• iCloud photo sync
• iCloud backup
• iTunes backup
• Transfer your photos to your computer via USB cable
• Apple Photo Stream
• Sync to Google Photos
• Sync to some other photo archiving service such as Shutterfly
• Sync to Dropbox
• Sync to box.com
• Sync to Microsoft OneDrive
• Sync to Amazon Photos
• back up to Livedrive
• Backup to any other backup or archiving service

If the answer is no to all of the above and your phone does not restart following the instructions in the link your photos are gone forever.

Trusting Apple quality is irrelevant. There are many reasons to back up, not just to protect against software or hardware failures (and ALL computers crash sometimes, not just Windows). Things like dropping a phone in a toilet or pool, accidentally throwing it under a bus, leaving it on the roof of your car when you drive away (someone reported doing that yesterday), lost phone, stolen phone, lightning strike, etc.

No one can save your info; that’s your responsibility. And it’s one reason that Apple makes it incredibly easy to back up and sync.

Have you followed the instructions in the link I posted yet?