Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say.
The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.
That means they disagree with you on the definition of the word, but it doesn't make it a synonym of figuratively.
Is that figurative speech?
If I say "I literally broke my arm" after I actually broke my arm, that use is completely correct. But you cannot be literally dead and still type a message, unless it's an automated message that you ordered someone/something to send AFTER you died.
If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.
OMG A GOAST SO SPOOKY
Would you be less likely to interpret it as such if the speaker has omitted "literally"?
I would say that that is an example of hyperbole. "I am so figuratively dead right now it's as if I am literally dead." The meaning of literally, there, remains intact.
In the same way, when someone complains that you left them waiting for "days" we don't say "sometimes days means ten minutes" but that sometimes people exaggerate.
So if it’s good enough for Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace, then it’s good enough for me. Literally.
https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-300-year-history-of-using...
There’s beating a dead horse, and there’s railing about the injustice of it all in the shadow of a great oak growing over the horses grave.
As an aside - word you may have been looking for is irrespective, or perhaps just plain old regardless. irregardless is not a word.