I've fallen victim to it a time or two myself, with things like "the older man" and "the other man," but lately I've been trying to snap me out of that and use their names or "he" instead. Really, it's not so hard, and I can always rewrite the sentence if I really need to.

There's a fandom classic I tried to read recently that does that for every single character, including Neville, as "the sandy-haired boy." It was impossible for me to get two pages in.