I've been using some of this stuff for a while now, and it has been helpful. But I get where you're coming from with "chi" (well, I usually see it spelled "qi", which is just a common way to romanize the original Chinese sound). I've had to get somewhat comfortable with the word.
The way I think about it is that we are missing a bunch of words for things that we don't have a very good handle on. We could spend a ton of time analyzing and categorizing, and come up with dozens of new words with satisfyingly precise meaning. Or we could (ab)use qi to mean whatever we want it to mean in a particularly context, and be horribly sloppy about it. From a theoretical mindset, the former is obviously superior; it's the only way to ensure you're making forward progress in understanding. But from a practical perspective, lots of people who aren't hung up on definitions are improving their lives every (well, most) days.
And that's not coincidental. It turns out that one of the biggest barriers to progress (in "life cultivation", but also elsewhere) is insisting on fully understanding every single thing before making use of it. It's a good way to avoid looking at the uncomfortable parts of yourself - just keep insisting "I don't get it. What exactly do you mean by '... sentence involving qi....'?"
We don't do that with power tools or computers. We have to take things on faith somewhere. Which is not to say you can't screw up by being too loose about it. There are plenty of people who say deep-sounding and nonsensical things while everyone nods wisely and knowingly. (But not all of those listeners are fooling themselves, either. Some are ignoring the details of the gibberish and are instead mapping it to what they think the person is trying to say based on what they know to be true from examining themselves.) And because of the imprecise language used, you're limited in what you can use to distinguish people who really have something to say from idiots parroting nonsense. Look at outcomes, if you can.
So it doesn't bother me too much when people say speed instead of velocity, or qi instead of the 100 different things it might mean: energy, blood, nerve impulses, the flow of cause and effect, change, rate of change, acceleration of change,... If someone has something to say but no shared words to say it with, I can't blame them for using a placeholder.
All that being said, 99% of what you'll read that mentions qi is really and truly nonsense. The imprecision is too good a place to hide bullshit, and there is an overwhelming quantity of bullshit to be hidden.