It's yet another borrowing of the prestige of technical terms -- propagated by LLMs, but in rampant misuse by poseurs even before AI: inflection point, exponential growth, order of magnitude, evolve, viable, ...
Seems Google Trends say ~50% "interest over time" around 2004, which Ngrams at that same time has about half the occurrence in books compared to around ~1926.
As the labs adjust their models to become more human, less repetitive and more of the population starts catching up these patterns, we'll see it become less used again, starting the new loop of the repeating cycle.