Depends on use case. When onboarding a user, it saves support emails when people can't figure out how to fulfill basic use cases. It also highlights new features that don't deserve main screen real estate but are requested.
It's only annoying when it's pointing out the obvious.
I also find them annoying, but begrudgingly appreciate them too. Usually they are interrupting my flow to introduce me to a new non-obvious feature, and sometimes those new features are super useful.
I think they’re a design smell. If your interface is designed well, you don’t need them. If you hide features behind cute-but-meaningless icons with no text tooltips, you users will still struggle to find them even with an irritating onboarding tutorial.
Patch notes? You can give users some bullet points to read when they run a new version for the first time, without railroading them into clicking through the menu structure.
Also maybe keep the menu structure logical so that users can actually discover functionality by looking through the menu, like we did in the old days before semantically relevant text was replaced with tastefully ambiguous generic pastel icons.
It's only annoying when it's pointing out the obvious.