> Work friends are not friends.

This is reductive to the point of absurdity. Situational friends are still friends. How many of your elementary school friends are still your friends these days? High school? Summer camp? Heck college friends? Unless you're living in the same town with the same people, there's a good chance that most of them aren't anymore. Were these people also not your friends? When you leave that book club, when you stop showing up at the corner cafe, when you move out of the neighborhood, how many of those people will you still be spending time with 5 years later. For the ones that you aren't, were they also not really friends?

Friendship isn't a binary thing. Not every friend you make will help you bury a body, but not every friend or friendship needs to (or should) run that deep. And sure not everyone you're "friendly" with at work are friends, it's a spectrum. But situational friends are friends. People you bond with for a short while over a shared experience and then when life moves one or both of you on the friendship ends are still friends.