It's also a Southern US term, not a coastal one, so I agree. Using it in place as an inclusive term comes off as pretentious and inauthentic.

I think "guys" is one of the few ones I disagree with, along with man hours, as in man meaning human, not man meaning male individuals. We don't stop using the term mankind because the word man is in it. It's not gendered.

To me as well, either arrogant or obsequious like a waiter at a restaurant saying “alright folks I’ll be your server tonight”. Edit: or as a sibling comment said, pretentious or inauthentic

To GP’s point, “guys” is interesting to me; it feels like a U-shape where people who don’t “get it” think it’s non-gendered, as do people who are very tuned in online (streamers, gaming spaces -which lean heavy male anyway -, highly online twitter types, etc) where cultural trends move and spread quickly. Then there’s kind of the middle I see, think HR activist types (acknowledging that HR does not always mean activist and vice versa) - clued in enough to follow the ideological trends, not quite enough to sense the ongoing shifts in real time. To be a bit reductive, I’d sum it up as something like people carrying the cultural context with them of the 2000s, the 2010s, or the 2020s