Dungeon World as a whole (with the 16 HP dragon post as a part of that) has been hugely influential on how I GM combat in OSR games. I guess I might summarise it as a keen focus on what is actually happening in the fiction and not allowing mechanical simplification to rid that of its excitement and strategy. I try to approach combat as if it were any other RPG situation - describing the action, asking the players what they do, and then adjudicating the results.
Yes, there is a level of abstraction - we’re not practitioners of HEMA, we’re not interested in the blow by blow - and yes, we do rely on existing rulings rather than inventing the wheel every time. However, only as long as those rulings are preserving what is important, what we are interested in, at the current moment. If they are not, we make new ones.
For example, very few of my quadruped monsters walk up and start exchanging melee attacks. They charge, leap, try and knock down, and then spring away. If a golem hits a character squarely they are going flying and might end up on the floor. Beyond that, my homebrew system has wounds for big hits, players have to say how they dodge or block an attack, and much lower HP totals for players and monsters, as I have found all of those things keep us so much more grounded in the fiction.
(“I block the acid spit”. Uh huh - how?)
I believe this is not a popular approach in the OSR/NSR spaces; people tend to prefer “combat is an abstraction” (and sometimes use “combat as a fail state” to imply it doesn’t need to be fun). But this mindset has made the game so much more fun and engaging for us.