It got me thinking because there's historicity to be obtained from Homer's works, and I was wondering if some of these characters could've represented real people turned into legends, similarly to how Gilgamesh became a legend yet we have reasonable proof he was an actual king.
because there's historicity to be obtained from Homer's works
Happy to fix a preconception: there isn't much to sustain this view. There are some respects in which Homer's depictions are based on real things, such as geographical locations. The same can be said for any fictional story set in a real place. But there's very little history which is obtained from Homer: that is, there's no historical events that we'd have missed out on if Homer had been lost.
The character of Achilles did exist before the Iliad, as I argued in this recent response, and so did some others. Two characters in the Iliad, Priam and Paris, appear to have Luvian names; a handful of other individuals have non-Greek names. Some people have tried to link them to people mentioned in Bronze Age texts, but there's very little similarity. Paris is a non-Greek prince of Troy with a Greek name, Alexandros; Alaksandu is a 13th century king of Wilusa who may or may not have a Greek name. There's nothing to link them together other than a casual resemblance between the names.
The main historical data that we do get from Homer is linguistic. We learn a lot about phonological developments and the relationship between dialects, and a fair amount about changes in vocabulary over time. We learn that there was a poetic intersection between the Aeolic and Ionic dialects, though there's active disagreement over the historical relationship between them in the poetic tradition. We learn from Homer that early Greek preserved a sound known as syllabic r (in effect, 'r' treated as a vowel) which otherwise survives only in some Indic and Slavic languages. We suspect that there's a genetic relationship between a handful of Homeric phrases and poetic phrases found in other Indo-European traditions.
I don't think this is the kind of thing you're hoping for. We don't have any good reason to believe that any person mentioned in Homer has a meaningful link to any historical king or leader.
For further reading on this I strongly recommend against anything you'll find in an encyclopaedia. My main recommendations are