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...sadly todaym that general perception is true.
I've been at this for 18 years and am still learning new things.. It never stops..and never should.
To interrupt, while we've had the "how do you make your characters?" question many times before (to the point one can basically predict the answers), this time the question is more "who do you make them?".
The two things are indeed quite separate.
One of the regulars in my cast, Emma...
... is, despite more customisation than you might think, absolutely recognisable as having been made from Valoria for Arabella 7:
However, she's absolutely not a blank slate character-wise.
Within my story, Emma is a nearly-2,000-year-old ghoul who was born as one of the Celtic Iceni tribe - indeed, she actually claims to be one of Boudicca's two daughters. However, no-one's sure if she's actually telling the truth about being royalty. Or indeed, many things, because she's a notorious joker. She's several centuries past taking herself too seriously or caring what others might think (but that's not to say she's immoral), although there are some who think that the eccentricity is still at least in part a facade, an effort to get people to underestimate her.
A less than entirely unique model... but I definitely know who my version is as a person. There's an established history (even if she might be vague about it to others), rather than being some actress I'll cast in different roles as needed.
Pretty much all of my characters are based on real life past friends & acquaintances. Although a character may actually be a mixture of several people, and often either an idealized version or a caricature of one or more of those friends. But I always have a real life reference. I find it easier to write dialog this way as I just imagine myself sitting in a diner having conversations with my old friends. And I think it helps me to write more realistic dialog, by not putting words into my characters mouths or having them do things they wouldn't do in real life. It’s also a way for me to reminisce and keep the memories of my old friends alive.
I've not written any scripts for plays and such for anyone to get attached to such a character. I don't even have named characters, or unnamed, any since I don't have a need for them. If I do ever develop a script or story, then I will need to name them then, or maybe not, as sometimes not having a name is more effective for the story telling at hand, then having a name. I can't imagine any writer of a play or story would consider their story a success if, after reading or viewing their story, their audience didn't have human emotions for the characters and events of the story. People even get good feelings for an Indian Summer, they do not go, "Beep bop bopy beep 010100101011110001101 boop bop bip beeep, It is autumn and the temperature has been unseasonably and confortably warm this week." So you want to use that sort knowledge such that you don't become a villian in the real news stories of the day, someday.
I do name my characters, even though they're all meant to be some representation of myself. Maybe one day I'll create a character so perfect for my purposes that I'll call it Nylon.
True story. My characters vary depending on if they are minor sidekicks or major players . . . but one character I wrote (I mentioned her briefly about rewriting the book because of her, in a post from a similar& thread the OP did)was such a strong character I decided to create a twitter page for Claire. I as an author got a few dozen likes over a span of 5 years. Granted I was terrible at social media and sucked at being self promoting, but when I put Claire's page and posted a few quotes from the book she got 200+ followers in the first few days and I only had just sold one book. People loved Claire even though her caption read "if you're following me to get a follow don't bother, you're wasting your F*****g time (except I wrote the word out correctly). I was shocked that people grew attached to her. Her image was a ghost crawling from a grave. Nothing sexy. So when I followed her and said I hated she was more popular than me and would kill her off in the next book, I got banned from twitter for a hate threat and she got to stay lol. I had to create a new email and username to rejoin twitter (but never bothered posting much after that).