"Fight fire with fire", to me, is a vivid metaphor precisely because, taken literally, it denotes something that is sometimes appropriate & sometimes not. But, of course, my vivid metaphor may well be your dead metaphor.

A widespread cluster of metaphors that IMO is a powerful & pernicious tool for question-begging is that of support, as in "foundations of mathematics", "ground of all being", and "basis of morality". Such phrases are often used to presuppose a hierarchy without examining whether one really is dealing with a hierarchy or with a network. And the metaphor itself is flawed, in view of the discovery that the earth is round. Given any sufficiently eccentric part of the earth, such as a mountain or a bridge, it is meaningful to ask what holds it up; but that does not make it meaningful to ask what holds the earth up, because the earth is itself the local standard of upness. So also with morality: some parts of it may be argued to justify other parts, without supposing that morality as a whole needs justification. Likewise, no doubt is cast on arithmetic by disputes over Whitehead & Russell's demonstration that 1+1=2.