> depending on which linguist you ask, it's actually two words that happen to be spelled and sound the same but each has their own meaning

In this case, I'm pretty sure those linguists are wrong.

I'm not being prescriptivist, and it's certainly possible that there's a usage I've not encountered established somewhere out there in the wild, but every use that I've seen pointed at as "using 'literally' wrong" reads to me as simply ordinary hyperbole. "It's so figuratively X it's almost literally X, but of course we understand it's still figurative." I've never seen an example where someone added the word "literally" to communicate that the utterance is figurative. We shouldn't call that another meaning for "literally" any more than we say that "miles" has a secondary meaning of "tens of feet" because someone said "I've walked miles around this store looking for you!"