The “ask anybody on the street” argument doesn’t really work because people also describe heaven as having pearly gates (when that actually is the Holy City in Revelation), or God being an old man with a long white beard, or to attribute proverbs to the Bible that it doesn’t say (like “money is the root of all evil” or “God helps those who help themselves.”)
That’s true, but the Bible does describe hell as the way people tend to think of it.
People used to describe their real-life encounters with space aliens in wildly different ways. Then, among UFO people, the Hill abduction in 1961 becomes a cause celebre, and the book Communion becomes a popular hit in 1987 and all people report encountering anymore are grays. How would people describe Hell if they’d never been told anything about it by someone else?