Personally, I have never gotten the hype by the names “baby,” “babe,” “bae,” “honey,” it feels forced to me. I’ve seen those TikTok videos where as a joke people will address their spouses by their real names and the spouses get mad and say something like “my family and friends can call me that, but you can’t.” I’ve never gotten the seriousness of it. If we already know we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife, why should I have to address you by those names? Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with saying them, but using real names should become more common as well.
I can’t be sure of the popularity of the opinion since I’ve never heard anyone talk about the subject online or in person.
I would, however, question whether or not one is more common than the other. Tiktok is a pretty bad place to judge reality from, and I can’t say I’ve ever been in a household where given names vs “pet” names were noticeably out of balance. Mind you, I was only in home health for maybe 17 years out of the total of twenty I was doing that work, so the sample set is smaller than it could be. Plus, that sample set leans hard to people that were over 50 and/or dealing with health issues, so that could change things too.
Anyway, the generic pet names weren’t something I experienced being used more than the “actual” name. Now, that includes variants of a name that would appear on ID, like an Elizabeth being called Beth, since many people prefer diminutives to their full given name.
Now, personalized pet names are pretty commonly used more than given names. Like, I used to date this really wonderful lady named Melissa. I would often call her my honey bee (which isn’t unusual for Melissas, since that’s the origin of the name), and she’d call me her teddy bear. So we never really used the generic ones at all, but the use of the personalized terms of endearment was still roughly equal to our given names (and we both use the full version of our names).
So, I can’t tell if your opinion is popular or not, but I’m moderately confident that using “actual” names is already normalized. It’s a common thing, and pretty much everyone I’ve known uses both pet names (generic or personal) intermixed with given names with at least approximate frequency.