Sorry if my question is not specific enough for a particular historical period for AskHistorians subreddit as per rule but I would like a reliable answer for my question.
Very often I see arguments all over the Internet on the number of casualties in any conflict as if one side attempts to downplay the horror of events by reducing the number of deaths and the other exaggerates the number to make one side more horrible. While I understand that casualty numbers get politicised (for example the Soviets argued they made more sacrifice due to 20 million casualties during WWII) in academia however, are actual figures really that important? Casualty statistics are just estimates and these estimations are I believe done with as much accuracy as possible despite some inevitable degree of error.
Arguing about 'true' statistics of casualties seems pointless and insensitive to me. Murdering one person is as horrible as killing 6 million Jews or 800,000 or 1.5 million Armenians. When people argue of true numerical values, they seem to forget that these are still human beings.
Part of my desire to know the true numbers involved is to feel more connected to the human beings who fought and/or died in these calamities. Too often the casualty numbers left over from history are biased, or even the products of propaganda themselves. Too often, the goals of chroniclers are not to humanize the dead, but rather glamorize their "sacrifice". By sifting through the various reports, and trying to come up with something closer to a true number, I feel we illuminate the true human cost involved, and give a voice to their deaths. I agree that arguing which atrocity is worse is a wasted exercise, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned with examining the true human cost instead of passively accepting contemporary accounts.
Arguing about 'true' statistics of casualties seems pointless and insensitive to me. Murdering one person is as horrible as killing 6 million Jews or 800,000 or 1.5 million Armenians. When people argue of true numerical values, they seem to forget that these are still human beings.
While in many cases you may be right, in those specific cases you're very wrong. In both of those cases there are concerted efforts by fringe theorists to promulgate contra-historical claims. Of course, lots of people have incorrect ideas about historical events, but those cases are important specifically because there are movements to both convince others of a counter-factual historical narrative, and to make sweeping political claims based on those narratives.
An academic discussion involving the number of people killed in, say, the Thirty Years War is an entirely different issue. Multiple historians may have different views on how to view the evidence surrounding an event. In the scheme of historical discussion, those sorts of discussions are relatively low-stakes. But for certain events, a large contingent of people are bent on hijacking history to push their own nationalist agenda against overwhelming facts.
What I think you're also missing is that genocide is a fundamentally different thing than just killing someone. You could argue that murdering someone in an argument is on the same level of immorality as killing someone as part of an effort to wipe out their ethnicity, but that's a question of philosophy, not history. But genocide is a fundamentally different thing, with different motives and implementation than regular old murder. While is why genocide is considered a crime against humanity, but killing my next-door neighbor for making too much noise isn't.
Outside these relatively small number of important cases (Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, probably more I'm not thinking of) there really isn't a "fixation" among historians regarding numbers of casualties. The examples you've picked are exceptions, which are particularly important for historians because of the dedicated movement of people trying to deny historical events.