When you speak do you use hand gestures?

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Yes, to both, in extremes.

The majority of my close relatives are avid hand gesturers - we joke about it being our own private form of communication, but really, our hands just seem to flail wildly when we speak. I'm prone to knocking things over when I talk due to my gesturing and poor spatial perception, so I try to keep all breakables away from my hand-waving radius.

I've stopped apologizing as much as I used to, but it still happens almost daily. There was this vicious cycle in place in which I would do/say something, apologize for it, be told not to apologize, then apologize for apologizing... you get the picture.

This is me as well. I never know what to do with my hands. Most times I feel like I am being watched and scrutinized when someone starts a conversation with me. I look down and realize that I am repeatedly wringing my hands, so then I purposely latch on to the armrests if I'm sitting. If I am standing then I throw them into my pockets. Since I am military, I cannot throw my hands into my pockets at work, so then the hand wringing starts again. Luckily, most NT's cannot tie hand wringing together with autism or I might be reviewed for separation.

Why is "marked impairment in use of gestures" a diagnostic criteria for AS if so many seem to use them I wonder?

One might think that hand gestures would be a NT thing to do because it is "body language", but it seems to be the opposite for some of us.

I have even been told that I use "too many" hand gestures. Maybe it does have something to do with thinking visually

All the time some people consider me very animated!

When I use gestures I usually confuse people because I point in the wrong direction or do something else that distracts their attention from what I'm saying. The other thing I do is often when I'm retelling an interaction to someone else I visualize the person I'm talking about being there and talk in that direction and the person I'm actually talking to starts looking around confused like "who or what are you looking at?"
I don't think I say "sorry" in excess but I do notice I use the words "actually" and "anyway" way too much. I didn't realize until my kid started emulating my speech patterns and I said where'd you learn that from? Duh.

two things I do a lot in conversation:

Move my hands/body

say the word No

They both seem to annoy people

speaker a: I saw a car crash today
me: no, there was this car crash on television last week that I was wondering if it could have been real or CGI I could not tell

speaker a: WTf?