Do reflexive verbs often evolve into intransitive usage?
It's been a while since I've thought about this aspect of grammar, but I feel I can add a few thoughts to the discussion. For starters, I was surprised to initially hear that dictionaries didn't report much in the way of intransitive senses of 'identify' because the first reading that popped into my mind was the psychological sense of 'identifying with' something, which is clearly grammatically intransitive in a strict sense. Of course, one can argue for a transitive phrasal verb, but I'll put that aside.
In the Discourse Functional flavor of Theoretical Linguistics, transitivity is seen as a continuum from high to low transitivity, and one that has multiple elements contributing to the overall transitivity of a clause. This type of heuristic is especially useful when looking at how different languages treat transitivity. That is, a given event with transitive semantics might be rendered intransitive in one language and transitive in another. In English, and many other languages, reflexives are transitive, albeit less transitive than other clauses when the subject is individuated from the object. That is to say, a sentence like, 'I cut the cake' is more transitive than 'I cut myself', at least in a semantic sense. Grammatically, however, they are both transitive, subject and object are present in both.
So to answer the question more directly, I'd say that while it may be possible that reflexivity played a role, I think I'd be more comfortable saying that a semantic context arose that an intransitive reading made sense. And the full story might have less to do with etymology, and more about chance derivation or lexicalization. Coining new terms happens all the time, and it's much easier to use what's already there in a novel way. I doubt anyone can pinpoint the original pathway of the noun, action, becoming the transitive verb, to action an item.
Although I haven't researched the matter with much rigor, I remember reading somewhere about another verb that is supposed to have evolved in a similar fashion: commit oneself (to [infinitive]) → commit (to [infinitive]). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the reflexive definition as V. (15) a.:
trans. (refl.). To obligate or bind (oneself) to a particular course of action, policy, etc., either explicitly or by some action or statement which implies an undertaking; to take a decision, make a statement, or perform an action from which no withdrawal is possible.
1774 London Mag. Dec. 581/2 We wish to be known as persons..who are not in haste, without enquiry or information, to commit ourselves in declarations, which may precipitate our country into all the calamities of a civil war.
[...]
2015 Daily Mail (Nexis) 20 Mar. The Government has committed itself to spending at least 0.7 per cent of GDP..on foreign aid.
Whereas the related intransitive defininition is down at V. (15) d.:
intr. To make a commitment to a course of action, a contract, etc.; to pledge, give an undertaking to do something.
1982 Business Week (Nexis) 25 Oct. 15 Investors are simply unwilling to commit at fixed rates far into the future.
1989 Wall St. Jrnl. (European ed.) 14 Feb. 22/3 CBS has suggested it would commit in advance for 22 episodes, an unusually large $10 million gamble on a new series nowadays.
1997 H. H. Tan Foreign Bodies (1998) xxvi. 228 I still didn't know if I could commit. ‘I don't know. I've been to church and it doesn't do anything for me,’ I said.
2012 Atlantic June 51/1 An iPhone app asks users to commit to visiting a gym a certain number of times each week and agree to forfeit at least $5 each time they skip.
(Actually, it looks like the OED doesn't distinguish the construction with a to-infinitive from the construction where other things come after the verb. I had been specifically thinking about the to-infinitive construction, but the OED quotations don't seem to provide any conclusive evidence about whether this construction is older or more recent than the more general intransitive use of commit described by definition V. (15) d.)