A very easy way to square all this (and what I assumed everyone understood to be going on before I ever heard of this discourse) is that people are just using exaggeration for emphasis (a very common rhetorical tactic).

Of course people aren't saying it's literally thing-they're-referring-to but that it has so much in common that it's "practically" almost exactly that thing.

I feel like people overcomplicate what needn't be complicated, sometimes (like people hallucinating a "fourth-person" pronoun to explain a convention perfectly already provided by current linguistical constructs).