We call this the quotative 'like' because it's about quoting what people say and also what they're thinking.
我们称之为引语式的 like,因为这是在引用人们说的话和他们的想法。
Emma的美味英语
So this quotative 'like' is only really used in casual, spoken English, so make sure if you're writing someone else's words or you're telling a story in written English, you stick with the regular reporting verbs and reported speech.
A quotative is a grammatical device to mark quoted speech in some languages, and as such it preserves the grammatical person and tense of the original utterance rather than adjusting it as would be the case with reported speech. It can be equated with "spoken quotation marks". In the English sentence