imo the best way to interpret those “real people don’t do x” writing advice posts is “most people don’t do x, so if a character does x, it should be a distinguishing trait.” human behavior is infinitely varied; for any x, there are real people who do x. we can’t make absolute statements. we can, however, make probabilistic ones.
for example, most people don’t address each other by name in the middle of a casual conversation. if all your characters do that, your dialogue will sound stilted and unnatural. but if just one character does that, then it tells us something about that character.
adding to this. the probabilistic framing is great but there’s another layer: fiction is working under serious time and space constraints. grief in real life might look like eating cereal at 11pm and forgetting to answer texts for a week. you don’t always have a week. so characters end up doing things that are statistically rare but emotionally efficient, and that’s not bad writing, that’s compression. the name-dropping dialogue thing is still a crutch though, because it’s not compressing anything, it’s just substituting for actual voice work. heightened behavior = often necessary. heightened language = usually lazy.
