It's just another plot-hole clashing with the people having little understanding of Canon's visual-easiness and subtlety, actually
See, post-SAO, technically Kirito does NOT look his IRL self at all in-game, the reason Leafa didn't recognize him despite the face being the same isn't because she's dumb but because the avatar created 'actually' doesn't look much like him beyond size, but because of 'easiness of recognition' the author made it so that the novel illustrations of the avatars ALWAYS have the exact same faces as the IRL-selves despite supposedly not being so in the actual universe (Sinon and Leafa, for example, WAY obviously don't have the same faces as Shino and Suguha, we just see it that way because the character design was based on the novels doing it so they would be easy to recognize). Fujino does the same thing without care because really, who is gonna complain? (Except the people wondering why Inoda didn't keep rerolling his character into an actual useful one and instead decided to stick with a fat ugly one barely any better than his IRL self with 'bricked' stats, but then again people aren't supposed to wonder the illogical decisions that would prevent the exact same ugly bastard from being the one fucking Asuna in both worlds)
Funniest thing, the author of one of the SAO spin-offs, "SAO: Alternative Gun Gale Online", actually went full ham with taking advantage of this particular aspect that canon ignores/glossed over, with the blessing of the original author, because it's a core part of his story's themes, so the character design for both the main cast and their in-game avatars are completely different and actually DO look like completely different people, like in SAO "realistically" everyone does, but unlike canon here we can actually see it firsthand without any toning down XD Like, look, this is the main character and her GGO Avatar, one of the most blatant examples:
