Yeah this is confusing that so many southerners in this comment section have never heard this. I have family north of Atlanta and they definitely call all soda coke.

I particularly remember this one incident maybe 20 years ago when I was a kid, where they visited us in New England and brought up a cooler of this soda they absolutely loved.... Sun Drop, I think. We were at the beach and I was at the cooler and asked if any of them wanted anything, and my cousin said "Yeah, grab me a coke please." I said we didn't have any coke. he said something like "there aint no way ya'll drank all that already" and he came a looked in the cooler himself, and grabbed a bottle of sun drop and asked if I was stupid or something. We cleared up this misunderstanding, but that incident stuck in my memory because it was both the first time I heard the word "ya'll" and the first time I heard "coke" generically refer to soda. He was also whipped behind the bushes for calling me stupid, which is the first time I'd ever seen anyone get whipped for misbehaving. I talked to my cousin about it later because I was really confused and he said quite a few of his friends get whipped when they misbehave, which was totally foriegn to me as a kid. I was scared AF of my aunt after that. They also referred to all adults as "sir" and "ma'am" which I also had never heard before, aside from old-timey movies.

I've also visited Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina and am positive they called soda "coke" where I went in NC and Tn and am pretty sure I heard it a couple times in Florida, too. Maybe the confusion here is that the people that never heard it called "coke" are from the city and have never been outside city limits before, or something. Either that or they're trolling, because I cant imagine having heard it so much as just a visitor, while residents of the areas have never heard it. Calling soda "coke" could also possibly be dying out and all these people that say they haven't heard it are just young.