Now, think about stuffed animals and dolls. Those are inanimate; most of the time highly stylized compared to their real-world inspirations; with exaggerated, unnatural features. And yet children will play with them, love them, and steadfastly claim that they are alive. That doesn't seem abnormal to me, but instead a very human thing to do. We just seem to be wired to interpret objects as if they have agency, even if it's just randomness or a simple mechanism that makes them move.

I'm not sure that's true. Many "normal" people love their cars as much as some people love their dogs.

Iff the sense in question is a reciprocal exchange of similar emotion, then it's true that it can't apply to objects without human-like emotional capacity, but that would seem likely to include actual dogs as well as robot dogs, notwithstanding that it is perhaps somewhat easier to mistakenly anthropomorphization the former than the latter.

I'm not convinced that there is a meaningful, significant sense where there is a distinction that applies generally to “normal humans” drawn at the point you want to draw it; it seems very much to be wandering into No True Scotsman territory.