Autism's confusing cousins

Life is difficult for people with severe autism (e.g. early childhood). Due to the increasing number of misdiagnoses, self-diagnoses, romanticization and constant trivialization, life is becoming even more difficult for these people. The opinion that autism is not a disease but a buzzword for strange people leads to real autistic people being denied the disease. It is often said: “They should just try harder or pull themselves together”. Please don't use the word autism in an inflated way - it harms those affected.

In a maximally earnest way — to what degree should we be sure these language harms are real on net? Are there data as opposed to anecdata? (Of course many phenomena are real without data; we can just be more confident in cases with data)