The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
some “smart” text editors would automatically emdash if you did --, like how microsoft word would … into a marginally smaller actual unicode ellipses character