You're the one who's saying that proceeding in a manner consistent with the writer and actor who originated the role, and another writer who developed a lot of the foundational lore of Star Trek, is "somehow assuming Number One is an alien or something like" without any basis. The authors who came up with the "Number One actually is her name" idea didn't pull the idea out of thin air, it was the original intent by the people who were creating the show, and it's far more likely that if the first pilot had gone to series, we would've seen a backstory more like that than simply having Number One called "Eureka Robbins" in passing in the middle of season two once the writers got bored with the "we never hear her name" gimmick. You know how I know that? Because the people who came up with the idea are the ones who were making the episodes.
It wasn't sad, bored Trekkies who can't abide something simple who made up this lore. The real fanwank is, in fact, the people who take the completely obvious interpretation that "Number One" is just a nickname for the first officer, and decide she has a boring, generic name to go with a boring, generic backstory, because God forbid there be anything interesting happening in Star Trek that wasn't placed right in front of our noses. Or, worse, that she's Christine Chapel's older sister. You want to talk about the worst instincts of fans when it comes to patching over the continuity, that's what you should be worried about.
Look at it this way: McCoy is divorced and has an estranged daughter. That was never on-screen (until ST09 for the first part), but it was backstory developed by the writers of the show in the '60s that was carried over in a ton of novels, comics, games, and so on. I don't think you'd be writing off any references to that as just being drama-obsessed fangirls who wanted to give Bones a dark, romantic, angsty backstory for their fanfics, right? Some wild extrapolation because fans just can't accept that a guy would just decide to be a space-doctor without any extrinsic motivation (ignoring any evidence to the contrary, like the fact that Bones clearly hates space and everything in it, just like you're all writing off Pike forgetting Number One's gender, which is an extremely odd thing to do to your immediate subordinate no matter how professional she is, unless there's something unrevealed going on). Hell, if Spock hadn't gone to the series, would you be arguing his first name is probably just "Benjamin" since we don't know for sure that he's an alien? Isn't it a bridge too far to assume that a regular guy who just has some funky ears doesn't have a first name? Everybody has a first name. It's not like he's Cher or something.
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