My point with my real life example is that 4 years isn't automatically a "friend earn" just due to time working together. Picard himself took 7 years to play poker with his crew. That's why Raffi is so jarring.
It's not "automatic," but it's hardly implausible either. Depends on the individuals involved, how they click, how the working relationship develops. There are people I've only worked with for a few months that I'm still close to, thirty-plus years later. There are other co-workers from the same era, who I used to have lunch with every day, that I haven't spoke to in decades.
There are no hard-and-fast timetables when it comes to interpersonal relationships, working or otherwise, so it didn't find it "jarring" at all. If anything, it struck me as an efficient, effective way to indicate that Raffi was not Riker 2.0 and that they had a different kind of working relationship. Show not tell, as others have noted in this thread.
As supposed to some sort of clunky expository dialogue along the lines of:
"You know, Raffi, ordinarily, I would never stand for most people calling me 'JT." Certainly, my former first officer, Will Riker, would have never done that. But you're different because blah, blah, blah . . . . "

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