I’ve never personally used the chore term, but it doesn’t bother me to see it and I don’t feel it has a negative connotation.

Cleaning my kitchen after a meal may be a chore, but it’s not an intrinsically bad or unpleasant experience most of the time, it’s just good hygiene and afterwards I have the satisfaction of things being clean. Not cleaning the kitchen feels way worse to me as it ultimately leads to other far more unpleasant situations.

Such it is with updating dependencies, it generally needs to be done, so it’s good to do it, but it’s in no way noteworthy, so chore describes it perfectly, to me it signals that: “it’s work that needed to be done, but not for a feature, functionality change or bug fix on this particular code base, so you’re unlikely to see much change”.