So, my 96 hit point 11th level 1e Ranger can stand around and let 20 longbow arrows pierce his body and what? He simply doesn't die from having all those arrow shafts impaling him? What sort of realistic is that? This is clearly balderdash.
Any serious idea can be presented comically, but that's just a matter of presentation, and says nothing about the idea itself. In this case, nobody said anything about longbow arrows piercing a body. And even if they did, there's no reason why that has to be inherently silly. I've seen stories where a sufficiently powerful fighter continues to fight, even with three or four arrows sticking out of his back, and those characters were never presented as the almighty warrior-god that a level 11 ranger might be. (Seriously, you're talking about a level 11 character, in a game where level 6 is already incredibly impressive.)
More reasonably, everyone worth talking about is either wearing armor or is magic. (And if they aren't, for whatever reason, then the DM is there to adjudicate that.) By level 11, most characters will be wearing magic armor. Can you really say that it's ridiculous for someone to suffer the impact of twenty arrows without dying, if they're wearing armor? Or if they're a wizard?
Obviously not. A fighter in magical armor, surviving dozens of solid hits from incoming arrows, is
far less ridiculous than a modern-day scientist surviving several gunshots to the chest because he's wearing a kevlar vest; and that's a perfectly normal degree with which to suspend disbelief.
6 points of damage to a level 1 1e fighter means "skewered through by a clothyard shaft and bleeding out" whereas for Cargorn (the level 11 ranger) it means basically nothing. This is simply a fact of the mechanics of the game, you can't paper over it.
The fact of 5E is that descriptions will vary from table to table. Older editions didn't even try to come up with a consistent explanation, leaving it as an exercise for the DM.
If
you assume that 6 damage means a level 1 fighter is skewered though and bleeding out, but it's a near miss to a level 11 ranger, then that's entirely on you. Other players were happy to come up with their own consistent explanations.
This is actually quite in keeping with wargaming, in which mechanics and statistics are only meant to represent how things work within the scenario being played, and not to represent the actual world.
Well, excuse me for expecting D&D to be an actual RPG, and not a wargame.