This is not an honest argument, as it does not reflect what I actually wrote. I can only conclude that you have no useful argument (on this issue at least) because you use reductio ad absurdum so often.
Sure, and I took it that way. I didn’t assume “meaningful” meant “most”.
It remains the case that I don’t know if it’s true. I’ve worked in environments that were more female than male, and I heard “guys” all the time.
No idea where the OP lives but in the Midwest ‘Hello Guys’ is the polite informal address for mixed genders or identities. Here it would be insensitive to say it only if you were addressing a Bachelorette Party or clearly a feminine specific outing group like a Tour of Homes.
What would a better nongender alternative be?
“Hey Humans!” “Hello fellow Homo Sapiens!”
yes, and some people have a problem with almost every alternative that has been proposed as well. The fact is that there is almost no word that you could use that at least some people would object to. In light of that, and unless someone in the group you are addressing has brought it to your attention that the word is problematic to them, at this point “guys” is as good a gender neutral word to address mixed company as any other you can pick.
I would suggest a 6th thing is reasonably clear, which is that it’s illustrative to look at how the word “offend” or “offensive” is used, even in this thread—how often it is used by people who are offended by being included in the plural “guys,” and how often it is used in the form of a hypothetical or imaginary (unreasonable) opponent who is (absurdly) grievously wounded by the use of that plural.
That is, how often “well, everyone’s offended by something” is a useful way of shrugging off why it’s not worth thinking about, since you can’t ever please those oversensitive snowflakes. Shades of the totally real trans people who yell at you for ten minutes over a single innocent slip-up/how They™ keep changing what you’re “allowed to call people”/why content warnings are not just pointless but an attempt at Orwellian censorship/etc.
Emphasis here added on your “I’m not going to beat myself up”—which is, I imagine, how basically everyone actually behaves in the real world in trying to be mindful of their language, and that basically any suggestion to be mindful also comes with a “I’m not going to beat anyone up, either” corollary.
Honestly, i mostly just hear, “hey”, without a following noun.
Asked my wife, and she said it depended on the group as to whether it was use it within a group of women. Probably not with her 2 closest friends, probably yes for her book clubs.
FWIW, I’ve pretty much stopped using “guys” as a bulk address in any setting, simply because I realized it is received as gendered in the minds of many people and I don’t need need the headache of pointlessly putting off people I’m trying to communicate with.
Small price to pay to respect people’s own ideas of gender identity.
If I catch myself starting “guys”, I can usually smoothly 
transition into “gang”, which has been acceptable so far.
I hesitate to stick my toe in this discussion, but I have a 70-year old woman friend who invariably refers to groups of women as “guys.” (Yes, we’re all Midwesterners.) If the OP were in a group with a woman who used the term, would she call the woman out on it?
That’s my take. The English language is diverse enough to avoid using any particular word if you are aware that it might be received unfavorably. It’s really not that hard.
At that time most of the people saying it did mean something like “all white males”.
We’ve been arguing about what that line means ever since (and I do include that there was immediate argument, if not much of it.) It turned out to be a lot bigger than the one who wrote it.
Somewhere back around 1980, a friend of mine was studying to be a chef. The men’s bathrooms at the college said “Men” on the doors. The women’s (there was no public question at the time of other alternatives) said “Ladies.”
My friend hung up a sign that said "Women Against “Ladies” ".
– “Ladies”, to me, has a condescending tone to it; except possibly in the phrase “ladies and gentlemen”, and when referring to women who hold such titles in some country’s “nobility”. Or as part of somebody’s stage name, which presumably they chose themselves.
I managed to pretty much pull that off in the 1990’s when our town was re-writing the zoning code (yes, we’ve done it again since.) It was a long battle over pretty much every use of the supposedly inclusive masculine, mostly with one older member of the planning board. (I was at the time the youngest member, I think. It’s been quite a while.)
This. For me it’s context- and tone-of-voice-dependent.
I tend to just say “Hi, all” or if it’s more formal “Hello, everybody”. But I’m not absolutely certain that I don’t sometimes say “guys”. And I’m not absolutely certain that I always notice when somebody else says “guys”.
There is however an underlying assumption to that: that to be “an equal part of the work group” one has to be assumed to be “one of the guys” – that is, to be considered as being “like a man”.
Seconding. That made me wince; and I’m from and in New York.
Some human people talk about “fur people”. So for some it may be specifying species.
I gritted my teeth at southern hick too.
Obviosly I’m southern. In Arkansas.
We get all those slurs, on the regular:
Hick.
Redneck.
Hillbilly.
Backwoods.
Inbred.
Slow.
Mostly I take them as a joke.
Occasionly, like that post, it seemed mean spirited and hateful.
(An aside, do you mean fur people like pets? Because there is another kind)
I wonder if it started as a California thing? I grew up in Texas and when my Cali cousins would visit, they used “guys” that way. It sounded a bit weird to my 10 year old ears back then (60 years ago). Now that I live on the left coast, I hear it all the time.
I think there is an important difference between your examples and “guys.”
Your examples are meant to be derogatory (slurs).
“Guys,” when addressing a mixed gender group (or even all females), is never meant in a derogatory way. Indeed, it’s the opposite, meant to include all as your pals.
And here I thought it was dismissive in origin, assuming that the only people worth talking to were men, and that some women accepted it in an effort to become part of that same group.
I meant cats, dogs, horses, squirrels, chimpanzees, whatever. It does occur to me that the term leaves out birds, dolphins, etc.
“Southern hick” was used by a poster in this thread in a derogatory sense. That’s what we’re objecting to.
Do we know that is how the language evolved this way?
What about “man” as an … I don’t know what part of speech it would be labeled as, an “interjection” maybe?
Like, if I say “Man, that movie was really great!”
Are people who aren’t men supposed to be offended?
“A guy walked into my store and asked for some cigarettes.”
How many people actually think that guy can mean “man” or “woman”, that there is some sort of ambiguity involved here?
If you are referring to that person as the “man” in your exclamation, then yeah. If you are just using it as a replacement for “shoot”, “gosh” or “Jesus”, then no.