I agree, there's a lot of people out there that sincerely use dude and guy neutrally. It doesn't come off very well in text but it's cool in person, the vibes are chill. Though I completely understand why a lot of people don't like it.

And this is a tangent, but my understanding of the word "man" is that it originally meant "person" while the words for adult male and adult female were "were" and "wif" respectively. Then "man" started being used in place of "were", which fell out of use. And for some reason "wif" became "wifman" and eventually "woman".

This boat has long since sailed but I think it's interesting that "man" used to be a gender neutralish word (boys were still the implied default I think).