I think we’re getting a bit distracted here by the fact that the frequently used “I literally died [of embarrassment]” is obviously figurative because nobody would be able to use the verb “to die” in the first person in the past tense.

When you get to thinks like “She literally died” it becomes murkier. “I could literally die if I ate shrimp” is murkier still.

This is one of the many reasons I’d like a firm firewall between ‘figuratively’ and ‘literally’. It seems I’m constantly besieged by the “language evolves, deal with it” crowd, but what they don’t get is that it’s all fine and well when language evolves in such a way to become more precise (perhaps by adding terms that distinguish between things that were previously lumped together, such as ‘dumbphone’ and ‘smartphone’ splitting from ‘cellphone’, itself a portmanteau of ‘cellular’ and ‘telephone’, to distinguish it from a fixed line) or to make meanings quicker to convey in conversation (by abridging the latter to ‘convo’, for example), but the ‘figurative’ versus ‘literal’ debate is very different, because it’s one of those relatively few instances that add ambiguity, making meanings (at least potentially) harder to convey.