alt Hacker NewsOh, no thanks. The emdash is lazy writing, through and through, for the same reason a parenthetical expressed any other way might be. LLMs overuse them the same way humans do: to pack in context where it doesn't belong. I'd happily lay the emdash and all its terrible cousins upon the sacrificial altar to see a renaissance in editing and proper sentence construction.
Fair enough. I fully recognize just how easily it gets abused, and "used with purpose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my original comment. That said, if someone's going to engage in sentence sprawl, I'd much rather an em dash get abused in the process than some of the alternatives. Bad em dashes are at least less ambiguous than a chain of a commas mashing meaning into mush, and they provide an obvious visual break that jumps out at the reader.
Em dashes are strong; they can take the abuse. While I'm right there with you on dreaming of a renaissance in quality writing, that's likely more fantastical than my own hopes that we'd see a resurgence in quality em dash usage. At this point, I'd probably settle for outright stagnation in writing ability.