Bandits fighting to the death always strikes me as profoundly stupid.

The moment they realize they're outmatched, they'll flee. If they're more evenly matched, they're still going to flee when it doesn't go their way.

Bandits steal to survive, kill when resisted when they can get away with it, and most importantly regular bandits will not attack a clearly fully geared, armed, and armored party of 6

If I'm the DM if regular unaffiliated bandits are attacking, there's a "reason" behind it that makes sense other than "oh no random highwaymen"

It's a minor pet peeve but I'm glad I'm not only person who thinks about realistic encounters.

Except the anti-metagaming tarrasque. That's an extra dimensional being who doesn't follow logical rules. Like meta gamers.

One of the most amusing and at times frustrating games I ever played was a campaign inspired by the Napoleonic Wars. The French were Gnomes who were extremely bad French stereotypes armed with muskets and liable to flee if their unit got attacked by three volleys OR their officer and/or standard bearer got sniped. Several parlays included awful french accents on the part of the DM and more than one encounter outright avoided by the PCs hiring a bunch of whores to distract or appease the frognomes, complete their objective and move on.

I'm generally not big on that approach. But then again, I rarely play at levels where the PCs can really take that superhero approach. Could be interesting to roll with that some time.