The fact is, it doesn't really matter what was intended of the word when it was created. "Growth hacking" on its surface seems to imply beating systems for the sake of growth. Sean Ellis, who is happy to tell you he coined the phrase, considers most marketing for the sake of driving growth "growth hacking." But, despite the fact that what I do probably matches both of those definitions, I would still
never call myself a growth hacker.
The reason I don't call myself that is because calling yourself a "growth hacker" is akin to calling yourself a "social media guru" or a "rockstar programmer." It's a buzz-word that's been taken over by people who have no idea what they're talking about. And if you have to beat your chest and call yourself a growth hacker, chances are you're not.
Are there some incredible marketers out there who beat and create systems to cause growth? Absolutely. But I don't think many of them call themselves "growth hackers" either. Interestingly enough I find a few brilliant minds when I'm roaming amongst the blackhatters of the world. The seedy underbelly of the Internet has some really sharp people in it determined to continually out-engineer Google, beat other systems, or just brute force something. And sometimes what they do is pretty ingenious. You can actually learn a lot from them if you look at the principles they use, legitimize them, and use them for good instead of evil. There are a lot of script kiddies to be sure, but that caliber of brilliant marketer, whether it be a spammer who uses it for evil or some of the marketers causing explosive growth at young companies rarely beat their chests and assign themselves buzz-wordy titles. They don't have to.
Just like social media experts don't call themselves "gurus." No one of any high level of legitimacy has ever assigned themselves the term "Thought leader." In the same way, 99% of the people who call themselves "growth hackers" are at a marketing intern equivalent level.
It's just turned into another phrase people who don't know what they're doing throw around because it sounds cool.