It's in the same boat as "growth hackers", which is what people in technology call themselves when they're afraid to admit that they do marketing.

Yep, it's almost as annoying as using "Apple adjectives" (flowery prose like wonderful, pleasure, beauty, love, etc... applied towards any tech).

Hacker hasn't really meant anything for decades. I remember the old guys getting mad when "hacker" became a boogieman for the news, but the recent round seemed to start when some dude wrote a book that used the cachet of "hacking" to sell impressionable youths on the idea of working for him in a tech-adjacent position. By appealing to someone's desires and by giving your thing a unique je ne sais quoi (no matter how flimsy it really is) you can influence them into your personal brand of chasing their desires.

Time and again, a term associated with a good and rare quality gets picked up by the business world, and then the marketing machine, in the process of using that term to sell everything and the kitchen sink, turns it into something annoying and worthless.

Why not hack breakfast altogether? Let's do lunch.