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Telling real stories truthfully is definitely fine.
Telling fiction is definitely fine.
Telling falsehoods about people that hurt their reputation is considered the tort of defamation.
The problem here is that we've got a story that's based closely enough on real events to identify the villain as a real person, but the real person isn't that villainous (and hence the reputational hit he takes is undeserved). If the story claimed to be real, then yeah, this'd be #3, no question. Completely coincidental similarities still clearly fall under #2; there's no mens rea, even a negligent one, if you didn't know a real person existed who uncannily resembled your Darth Vader (nobody knows the exact traits of everybody in the world). Here, though, we're stuck in the middle; the story is claimed to be fiction, so it's not an outright lie, but there's potential real undeserved damage to reputation that's the result of real choices on the author's part.
The obvious case here is A Few Good Men, which was closely based on a real Guantanamo Bay incident (the fenceline shooting, the requested transfer, the rag stuffed down the throat, and the hazers calling the ambulance were all lifted from the real case, which Sorkin's sister defended and told him about) but changes two major details in ways that make Dawson and Downie look worse than the people they're based on (the real hazee didn't die and the real hazers who went to trial weren't dishonorably discharged). Sorkin and the movie's production company got sued by the real hazers for defamation; WP doesn't state how it went so there was probably a settlement of some sort. Which side was in the right? You can argue either way, but I don't think it's obvious.
All the examples you give except the novel are not in this limbo; truthful memoirs/bitching/tweetstorms are #1 and are definitely fine, while false ones (because they're outright lies, having been stated to be real) are #3 and are very much not fine.
Given that you had a month to read it, I'm amazed that you didn't address most of the things I said in that post.
This case is clearly distinguishable from A Few Good Men in that the real incident was public record and would have been well known to many people, part of any background check that the Marines went through later in life, and ultimately "googleable" though this wasn't a relevant concept at the time Sorkin was writing. The Cat Person connection was too obscure to be identifiable to more than a handful of people, up until Nowicki chose to put it all out there for attention. There was no way to google some combination of "30 something guy some time in the late oughts or early teens who dated a college freshman in Ann Arbor and worked at a movie theater and was super lame" that would deliver that guy's name. To repeat myself:
The general rule of thumb is that a reasonable reader would recognize the plaintiff, not just a small handful of people who can recognize him from obscure knowledge but an identifiable community of people. This identification clearly fails on those grounds: only a small handful of people could possibly recognize these characters.
It's adorable that you assume that Kulak and Scott Aaronson are telling the truth when they rant about the awful Normies they have to interact with; let alone telling the truth as the Normies would recollect it. We'd have a real Rashomon on our hands if we ever got a hold of the people who have to interact with Scott Aaronson and they gave their side of the story as to what they think really happened there. The idea that there is an objective "truth" to get at whether someone is bad in bed or said a bad word once or was rude or didn't care that Scott Aaronson was lost is as good as a heckler's veto on fiction.
In research for another recent thread, I discovered that the writer of Sandlot was sued by Squints because he had made him look like kind of a dork at twelve years old; this despite Squints marrying the school hottie and having nine kids at the end of the film! He gave Squints the opposite of the Small Penis Rule treatment, and Squints still fucking sued!
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