I think I have the same kind of garden variety visualization experience that you have. There is bound to be a spectrum where some people's mental imagery is virtually non-existent on one end, and it's very lucid and persistent on the other. The people who come out of the woodworks online claiming they have a mental heads-up display, like AR superimposed on their vision, make me raise an eyebrow. I'd be more inclined to believe that a child had such an experience, but by the time we're adults, our brains have normally found it more advantageous to be squarely grounded in baseline reality.