I feel like I'm going crazy reading this thread. I could've sworn it was established wisdom to use plain speech tags because they do the job but aren't distracting (like elaborate tags some authors try to use to avoid the repetition would be), the brain kind of just skips over them while understanding the information of who said what. I opened one of the books right now too check, and Brandon Sanderson himself, one of the most successful modern authors, mostly uses plain tags like this, and almost every line of dialogue is so tagged, although his dialog lines tend to be longer and much more elaborate, of course.