As someone who does use em-dashes (and never en-dashes) I don't really disagree. Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation.

As someone who does use em-dashes (and never en-dashes) I don't really disagree. Double quotes in particular are a ridiculously overloaded piece of punctuation. On the other hand em-dashes have some aesthetic appeal vs. hyphens or double hyphens as I would use on a site like this. (Even if I think there is legitimate debate over whether they should have spaces around them or not.) En-dashes? I was on the style committee at a prior company and I don't think we used them because it would have been another thing copyeditors had to fix every time.