Only times i've ever used the emdash was to signal sophistication. It's not like it makes the text any more understandable. Of course some people may have more

Only times i've ever used the emdash was to signal sophistication. It's not like it makes the text any more understandable. Of course some people may have more practical reasons to use it, and there's nothing wrong with more or less conscious status signaling, it's probably unavoidable. But every status signal that's cheap to fake is going to get faked, and that's exactly what happened. Now you don't even have to know about its existence to use it, and in the effect it has shifted to signal low cultural capital. In a few years it will probably get RLHFed out of the default LLM tone. Next step is also already happening: people countersignaling by consciously still using it, showing that they can afford it, because they're unmistakably not pushing AI slop.