I’ve noticed that Physics2D.OverlapCircle doesn’t sense colliders set to trigger. Is that simply how it works or is there a way to bypass this? I couldn’t find anything about this on the documentation.
You did not look far enough. It is the ContactFilter2D, which has a .useTriggers property. 
As above, you specify that in the ContactFilter2D but if you use an overload of a 2D physics query where you don’t specify that then it uses the global setting of Physics2D.queriesHitTriggers however because this is global, it means it’ll apply to all queries so personally I’d not use this and explicitly specify it in the ContactFilter2D.
Note that you can make the ContactFilter2D a public (or serializable) field in your script then configure it via the inspector if you wish. This can make it easier to select layers, triggers etc.