Annoying? Oh yea.

But what is wrong with reaching out? Seems like a different way of phrasing “make contact with”, except with a connotation of intending to help.

Btw, 'intending to help' I don't think is implied. Naturally you may 'reach out' to provide or offer assistance, but in a business context there should be a business driver for doing the actual contact thing, and then you can choose to specify the context or not.

I use language along these lines, often after talking about an issue, as a way of steering the conversation onto solutions. In my experience, it can be a useful phrase.

'Can you call Bob's surf shop and see if they carry Mr. Zog's Sex Wax?'

'Please find out if Bob's surf shop carries Mr. Zog's Sex Wax.'

A few of the terms in the header image on the article seem perfectly appropriate to me depending on context, but I'm probably thinking of them being used literally (reaching out as in contacting, incentivising as in more money paid, deep dive as in RCA) and have insufficient exposure to the BS versions to comment - so, I'll stop!

Eg if you ask someone to call bobs surf shop and they don’t answer they might stop there or call back later. If you ask them to reach out they might go down there and see them, set up a meeting, speak to a friend that works there, etc.

That's where you can use the more general and succinct term, "contact".

"can you reach out to Carol and see when that will be done" vs "can you ask Carol when that will be done?"

Ever since Walking Dead came out, "reach out" evokes thoughts of hordes of zombies grabbing for me.

there are manager bullshit and verbal tics like the one you mentioned. I tend(ed) to use "long story short..." to force myself to summarize, but when a colleague of mine started to use it over 3 times in a single sentence, I've since stopped using it.