Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.

yeah? it’s not that weird of a term

I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.