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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42657
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I hate to give the old standby answer, "it all depends ..." But, it all depends.

Of course in most stories there are characters who appear briefly to perform some specific function and then disappear, and the reader thinks nothing of it. Like if the main character rides on an airplane, you might briefly mention that the pilot came over the PA system and announced that the plane is arriving in Chicago where the local time is, etc, as a device to say where the hero was going. The reader is not baffled or disappointed if the pilot is not a fully developed character and does not turn up again later in the story.

Some stories are naturally episodic. For example, in many detective novels, the brilliant detective investigates some crime, solves it, and then moves on to the next crime, one after the other. The reader expects characters related to each crime to appear, to be extremely important to the story for a chapter or two, and then to disappear, never to be mentioned again.

But in general, the reader expects their to be a cast of characters who move through the story together. While it's true that in real life we make friends and then move to another town and never see them again, we get a job and get to know our coworkers and then get a different job and have a new set of coworkers, etc, in fiction we expect more continuity than in real life. In real life I have years to get to know these people before I move in. In a novel there may be a few pages. Characters who come and go too quickly don't have a chance to grab the readers attention.

I read a novel once that consisted of a series of episodes aboard a star ship, where the heroine met people who were traveling on this ship, learned they had some problem, solved their problem, and then the characters disappeared from the scene and she met new people with new problems. While it was a good story, and I cared about the heroine's problems, I found that I didn't care much about the minor characters' problems. They were introduced and a page or two later, when I had not had time to "get to know" them at all, suddenly the writer expects me to care about their personal problems. I just didn't. They weren't around long enough. If my brother tells me that he's having problems with his marriage, I care because I've known him for decades. If a stranger walked up to me on the street and started telling me about his marriage problems, I'm sorry but I just don't care.

That's not to say that every character has to be around for the entire story. But they have to be around long enough for the reader to get invested and care about them.

Oh, and remember: The characters can be much more interesting to the author than they are to the reader. You've spent months thinking about this character and developing this character and getting into the life of this character. But to the reader, if it's just a few pages, he's only spent minutes.

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